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THE HISTORY
OF TRADE UNIONISM
THE HISTORY OF TRADE
UNIONISM, 1666-1920: BY
SIDNEY AND BEATRICE
WEBB.
PRINTED BY THE AUTHORS
FOR THE TRADE UNIONISTS
OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.
CHRISTMAS 1919
INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION
OF 1920
The thirty years that have elapsed since 1890, down to
wliich date we brought the first edition of this book, have
been momentous in the history of British Trade Unionism.
The Trade Union Movement, which then included scarcely
20 per cent of the adult male manual-working wage-earners,
now includes over 60 per cent. Its legal and constitutional
status, which was then indefinite and precarious, has now
been explicitly defined and embodied in precise and abso-
lutely expressed statutes. Its internal organisation has
been, in many cases, officially adopted as part of the
machinery of public administration. Most important of
all, it has equipped itself with an entirely new poHtical
organisation, extending throughout the whole of Great
Britain, inspired by large ideas embodied in a comprehensive
programme of Social Reconstruction, which has already
achieved the position of " His Majesty's Opposition," and
now makes a bid for that of " His Majesty's Government."
So great an advance within a single generation makes the
historical account of Trade Union development down to
1920 equivalent to a new book.
We have taken the -opportunity to revise, and at some
points to amplify, our description of the origin and early
struggles of Trade Unionism in this country. We have
naturally examined the new material that has been made
accessible during the past quarter of a century, in order to
VI Introduction
incorporate in our work whatever has thus been added to
pubHc knowledge. But we have not found it necessary
to make any but trifling changes in our original interpre-
tation of the historical development. The Home Office
papers are now available in the Public Record Office for
the troubled period at the beginning of the nineteenth
century ; and these, together with the researches of Pro-
fessor George Unwin, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, Professor
Graham Wallas, Mr. Mark Ho veil, and Mr. M. Beer, have
enabled us both to verify and to ampHfy our statements at
certain points. For the recent history of Trade Unionism
we have found most useful the collections and knowledge
of the Labour Research Department, estabhshed in 1913 ;
and we gratefully acknowledge the assistance in facts,
suggestions, and criticisms that we have had from Mr.
G. D. H. Cole and Mr. R. Page Amot. We owe thanks,
also, to Miss Ivy Schmidt for unwearied assistance in
research.
The reader must not expect to find, in this historical
volume, either an analysis of Trade Union organisation,
policy, and methods, or any judgement upon the vahdity of
its assumptions, its economic achievements, or its Umitations.
On these things we have written at great length, and very
expHcitly, in our Industrial Democracy, and in other books
described in the pages at the end of this volume, to which
we must refer those desirous of knowing whether the Trade
Unionism of which we now write merely the story is a good
or a bad element in industry and in the State.
SIDNEY AND BEATRICE WEBB.
41 Grosvenor Road,
Westminster,
January 1920.
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
OF 1894
It is not our intention to delay the reader here by a con-
ventional preface. As every one knows, the preface is
never written until the story is finished ; and this story
will not be finished in our time, or for many generations
after us. A word or two as to our method of work and
its results is all that we need say before getting to our
main business.
Though we undertook the study of the Trade Union
movement, not to prove any proposition of our own, but
to discover what problems it had to present to us, our
minds were not so blank on the subject that we had no
preconception of the character of these problems. We
thought they would almost certainly be economic, pointing
a common economic moral ; and that expectation still
seems to us so natural, that if it had been fulfilled we should
have accepted its fulfilment without comment. But it
was not so. Our researches were no sooner fairly in hand
than we began to discover that the effects of Trade Unionism
upon the conditions of labour, and upon industrial organ-
isation and progress, are so governed by the infinite technical
variety of our productive processes, that thej^ vary from
industrvT- to industry and even from trade to trade ; and
the economic moral varies wdth them. Where we expected
to find an economic thread for a treatise, we found a spider's
web ; and from that moment we recognised that what
viii Preface
wc had first to write was not a treatise, but a historj-.
And we saw that even a history would be impossible to
follow unless we separated the general history of the whole
movement from the particular histories of thousands of
trade societies, some of which have maintained a continuous
existence from the last century, whilst others have cropped
up, run their brief course, and disappeared. Thus, when we
had fmished our labour of investigating the records of
practically every important trade society from one end of
the kingdom to the other, and accumulated piles of extracts,
classified under endless trades and subdivisions of trades,
we found that we must exclude from the first volume all
but a small selection from those documents which appeared
to us most significant with regard to the development of
the general movement. Many famous strikes and lock-outs,
many interesting trade disputes, many sensational prosecu-
tions, and some furious outbursts of riot and crime, together
with many drier matters relating to particular trades, have
had either to be altogether omitted from our narrative, or
else accorded a strictly subordinate reference in their rela-
tion to the history of Trade Unionism as a whole. All
analysis of the economic effects of Trade Union action we
reserve for a subsequent volume on the Problems of Trade
Unionism, for which we shall draw more fully from the
annals of the separate unions. And in that volume the
most exacting seeker for economic morals will be more
than satisfied ; for there will be almost as rriany economic
morals drawn as societies described.
That history of the general movement, to which we
have confined ourselves here, will be found to be part of
the political history of England In spite of all the pleas
of modern historians for less history of the actions of govern-
ments, and more descriptions of the manners and customs
of the governed, it remains true that history, however it
may reUeve and enliven itself with descriptions of the
manners and morals of the people, must, if it is to be history
at all, follow the course of continuous organisations. The
Preface ix
history of a perfectly democratic State would be at once
the history of a government and of a people. The history
of Trade Unionism is the history of a State within our
State, and one so jealously democratic that to know it well
is to know the English working man as no reader of middle-
class histories can knc^w him. From the early years of the
eighteenth century dowTi to the present day, Democracy,
Freedom of Association, Laisser-fuire, Regulation of the
Hours and Wages of Labour, Co-operative Production,
Free Trade, Protection, and many other distinct and often
contradictory pohtical ideals, have from time to time
seized the imagination of the organised wage-earners and
made their mark on the course of the Trade Union move-
ment. And, since 1867 at least, wherever the ideals have
left their mark on Trade Unionism, Trade Unionism has
left its mark on politics. We shall be able to show that
some of those overthrows of our party governments which
have caused most surprise in the middle and upper classes,
and for which the most far-fetched reasons have been given
by them and their journalists and historians after the event,
carry their explanation on the surface for any one who
knows what the Trade Unionists of the period were thinking.
Such demonstrations, however, will be purely incidental,
as we have written throughout of Trade Unionism for its
own sake, and not for that of the inn^mlerable sidelights
which it throws on party pohtics.
In our concluding chapter, which we should perhaps
offer as an appendix rather than as part of the regular
plan of the volume, we have attempted to give a bird's-eye
view of the Trade Union world of to-day, with its unequal
distribution, its strong sectional organisation and defective
political machinery, its new governing class of trade officials
— above all, its present state of transition in methods,
aims; and poUcy, in the face of the multitude of unsettled
constitutional, economic, and political problems with which
it stands confronted.
A few words upon the work of collecting materials for
X Preface
our work may prove useful to those who may hereafter
come to reap in the same field. In the absence of any
exhaustive treatment of any period of Trade Union history
we have to rely mainly upon our own investigations. But
every student of the subject must acknowledge the value
of Dr. Brentano's fertile researches jnto English working-
class history, and of Mr. George Howell's thorouglily prac-
tical exposition of the Trade Unionism of his own school
and his own time. Perhaps the most important pubHshed
material on the subject is the Report on Trade Societies and
Strikes issued by the Social Science Association in i860, a
compact storehouse of carefully sifted facts which compares
favourably with the enormous bulk of scrappy and unverified
information collected by the five historic official inquiries into
Trade Unionism between 1824 and 1894. We have, more-
over, found a great many miscellaneous facts about Trade
Unions in periodical literature and ephemeral pamphlets
in the various public libraries all over the country. To
facilitate the work of future students we append to this
volume a complete list of such pubUshed materials as we
have been able to discover. For the early history of com-
binations we have had to rely upon the public records, old
newspapers, and miscellaneous contemporary pamphlets.
Thus, our first two chapters are principally based upon the
journals of the House of Commons, the minutes of the
Privy Council, the publications of the Record Office, and
the innumerable broadsheet petitions to ParHament . and
old tracts relating to Trade which have been preserved in
the Britisli Museum, the Guildliall Library, and the in-
valuable collection of economic literature made by Professor
H. S. Foxwell, St. John's College, Cambridge.^ Most im-
portant of all, for the period prior to 1835, are the many
volumes of manuscript commentaries, newspaper cuttings,
rules, reports, pamphlets, etc., left b}' Francis Place, and
now in the British Museum. This unique collection, formed
by the busiest politician of his time, is indispensable, not
^ Now in the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London.
Preface xi
only to the student of working-class movements, but also
to any historian of English political or social life during
the first forty years of the century,^
But the greater part of our material, especially that
relating to the present century, has come from the Trade
Unionists themselves. The offices of the older unions
contain interesting arcliives, sometimes reaching back to
the eighteenth century — minute-books in which generations
of diligent, if imlettered, secretaries, the true historians of
a great movement, have struggled to record the doings of
their committees, and files of Trade Union periodicals,
ignored even by the British Museum, through which the
plans and aspirations of ardent working-class poHticians
and administrators have been expounded month by month
to the scattered branches of their organisations. We were
assured at the outset of our investigation that no outsider
would be allowed access to the inner history of some of the
old-fashioned societies. But we have found this prevalent
impression as to the jealous secrecy of the Trade Unions
without justification. The secretaries of old branches or
ancient local societies have rummaged for us their archaic
chests with three locks, dating from the eighteenth century.
The sur\d\'ing leaders of a bygone Trade Unionism have
ransacked their drawers to find for our use the rules and
minutes of their long - forgotten societies. In many a
working man's home in London and Liverpool, Newcastle
and Dublin^ — above all, in Glasgow and Manchester — the
descendants of the old skilled handicraftsmen have un-
earthed " grandfather's indentures," or " father's old card,"
or a tattered set of rules, to help forward the investigation
of a stranger whom they dimly recognised as striving to
record the annals of their class. The whole of the docu-
^ Place's Letter Books, together with an unpublished autobiography,
preserved by his family, are now in the custody of INlr. Graham Wallas,
who is preparing a critical biography of this great reformer, which will
throw much new light on all the social and political events of English
history between 1798 and 1840 [pubUshed, ist edition, 1898; 2nd edition
1918].
xii Preface
mcnts in the offices of the great National and County
Unions have been most generously placed at our disposal,
from the printed reports and sets of rules to the private
cash accounts and executive minute-books. In only one
case has a General Secretary refused us access to the old
books of his society, and then simply on the ground that
he was himself proposing to write its history, and regarded
us as rivals in the literary field.
Nor has tliis generous confidence been confined to the
musty records of the past. In the long sojourns at the
various industrial centres which this examination of local
archives has necessitated, every facility has been afforded
to us for studying the actual working of the Trade Union
organisation of to-day. We have attended the sittings of
the Trades Councils in most of the large towns ; we have
sat through numerous branch and members' meetings all
over the country ; and one of us has oven enjoyed the
exceptional privilege of being present at the private delibera-
tions of the Executive Committees of vaiious national
societies, as well as at the special delegate meetings sum-
moned by the great federal Unions of Cotton-spinners,
Cotton-weavers, and Coalminers for the settlement of
momentous issues of trade policy, and at the six weeks'
sessions in 1892 in which sixty chosen delegates of the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers overhauled the trade
pohcy and internal administration of that world-wide
organisation.
We have naturally not confined ourselves to the work-
men's side of the case. In almost every industrial centre
we have sought out representative employers in the different
industries. From them we have received many useful
hints and criticisms. But, as might have been expected,
the great captains of industry are, for the most part, ab-
sorbed in the commercial side of their business, and arc
seldom accurateh' acquainted with the details of the past,
or even of the present, organisation of their workmen. Of
more assistance in our task ha\e been the secretaries of the
Preface xiii
various employers' associations. Especially in the ship-
building ports have these gentlemen placed at our disposal
their experience in collective negotiation with the different
sections of labour, and the private statistics compiled by
their associations. But of all the employing class we have
found the working managers and foremen, who have them-
selves often been workmen, the best informed and most
suggestive critics of Trade Union organisation and methods.
We have often regretted that precisely this class is the
most difficult of access to the investigator of industrial
problems, and the least often called as witnesses before
Royal Commissions.
The difficulty of welding into narrative form the innumer-
able details of the _ thousands of distinct organisations,
and of constructing out of their separate chronicles anything
like a history of the general movement, has, we need hardly
say, been very great. We are painfully aware of the
shortcomings of our work, both from a literary and from a
historical point of view. We have been encouraged in our
task by the conviction — strengthened as our investigation
proceeded — that the Trade Union records contain material
of the utmost value to the future historian of industrial
and political organisation, and that these records are fast
disappearing. Many of the older archives are in the pos-
session of individual workmen, who are insensible of their
historical value. Among the larger societies it is not
uncommon to find only one complete set of rules, reports,
circulars, etc., in existence. A fire, a removal to new
premises, or the death of an old secretary frequently results
in the disappearance of everything not actually in daily
office use. The keen investigator or collector will appreciate
the extremity of the vexation with which we have learnt
on arriving at an ancient Trade Union centre that the
" old rubbish " of the office had been " cleared out " six
months before. The local public libraries, and even the
British Museum, seldom contain any of the internal Trade
Union records new or old. We have therefore not only
xiv Preface
collected every Trade Union document that we conld
acquire, but we have made lengthy extracts from, and
abstracts of, the piles of minute-books, reports, rules,
circulars, pamphlets, working-class newspapers, etc., which
have been lent to us.
This collection of material, and, indeed, the wide scope
of the investigation itself, would have been impossible if
we had not had the good fortune to secure the help of a
colleague exceptionally well qualified for the work. In
Mr, F. W. Galton we have found a devoted assistant, to
whose unwearied labours we owe the extensive ran^e of
our material and our statistics. Himself a skilled handi-
craftsman, and for some time secretary to his Trade Union,
he has brought to the task not only keen intelligence and
unremitting industry, but also a personal acquaintance
with the details of Trade Union life and organisation
which has rendered his co-operation of inestimable value.
We have incorporated in our last chapter a graphic sketch
from his pen of the inner life of a Trade Union.
We have, moreover, received the most cordial assistance
from all quarters. If we were to acknowledge by name all
those to whom our thanks are due, we should set forth a
list of nearly all the Trade Union officials in the kingdom.
Individual acknowledgement is in their case the less neces-
sary, in that many of them are our valued personal friends.
Only second to this is our indebtedness to many of the
great " captains of industry," notabl}^ to Mr. Hugh Bell,
of Middlesboro', and Colonel Dyer, of Elswick, and the
secretaries of employers' associations, whose time has been
freely placed at our disposal. To Professor H. S. Foxwell,
Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor E. S. Beesly, Mr. Robert
Applegarth, and Mr. John Burns, M.P., we are especially
indebted for the loan of many scarce pamphlets and working-
class journals, whilst Mr. John Burnett and Mr. Henry
Crompton have licen good enough to go through one or
more of our chapters in proof, and to improve them by
numerous suggestions. And there are two dear comrades
Preface xv
and friends to whose repeated revision of every line of our
manuscript the volume owes whatever approach to literary
merit it may possess.
The bibliography has been prepared from our material
by Mr. R. A. Peddie, to whom, as weU as to Miss Apple-
yard for the laborious task of verifying nearly all the quota-
tions, our thanks are due.
SIDNEY AND BEATRICE WEBB.
41 Grosvenor Road,
Westminster,
A/>nl 1894.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
Introduction to the Edition of 1920 ... v
Preface to the Original Edition of 1894 . . vii
I. The Origins of Trade Unionism .... i
II. The Struggle for Existence [i 799-1825] , „ 64
• III. The Revolutionary Period [1829 -1842] . . 113
IV. The New Spirit and the New Model [1843-
1860] ......... 180
V. The Junta and their Allies .... 233
VI. Sectional Developments [1063-1885] . . . 299
VII. The Old Unionism and the New [1S75-1890] , 358
VIII. The Trade Union World [1890-1894]. , . 422
IX. Thirty Years' Growth [1890-1920] . , . 472
X. The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
[1890-1920] 594
XI. Political Organisation [1900- 1920] . . . 677
Appendix. — On the assumed connection between the Trade
Unions and the Gilds in Dublin — The Rules of the Grand
National Consolidated Trades Union — Sliding Scales
xvii
xviii Contents
PAGE
The Summons to the First Trade Union Congress —
Distribution of Trade Unionists in the United King-
dom— The Progress in Membership of particular Trade
Unions — Pubhcations on Trade Unions and Combinations
of Workmen — The Relationship of Trade Unionism to the
Government of Industry . . . . . .721
Index 76
THE HISTORY
OF
TRADE UNIONISM
CHAPTER I
f
THE ORIGINS OF TRADE UNIONISM
A Trade Union, as we understand the term, is a continuous
association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining
or improving the conditions of their working Uves.i This
form of association has, as we shall see, existed in England
for over two centuries, and cannot be supposed to have
sprung at once fully developed into existence. But although
we shall briefly discuss the institutions which have some-
times been described as the forerunners of Trade Unionism,
our narrative will commence only from the latter part of
the seventeenth century, before which date we have been
unable to discover the existence in the British Isles of
anything falUng ^\dthin our definition. Moreover, although
it is suggested that analogous associations may have existed
during the Middle Ages in various parts of the Continent of
Europe, we have no reason to suppose that such institutions
«K-' ?^*?^ ^''^* ^"^/^'^^ "^^ ^^'"^ " °^ *^^^^ employment." This has been
objected to as implymg that Trade Unions have always contemplated a
perpetual continuance of the capitahst or wage-system. No such imphca-
tion was intended. Trade Unions have, at various dates during the past
century at any rate, frequently had aspirations towards a revolutionary
change in social and economic relations.
6
2 The Origins of Trade Unionism
exercised any influence whatever upon the rise and develop-
ment of the Trade Union Movement in this country. We
feel ourselves, therefore, warranted, as we are indeed com-
pelled, to limit our history e>:clusively to the Trade Unions
of the United Kingdom.
We have, by our definition, expressly excluded from
our history any account of the innumerable instances in
which the manual workers have formed ephemeral combina-
tions against their social superiors. Strikes are as old as
history itself. The ingenious seeker of historical parallels
might, for instance, find in the revolt, 1490 B.C., of the
Hebrew brickmakers in Egypt against being required to
make bricks without straw, a curious precedent for the strike
of the Stalybridge cotton-spinners, a.d. 1892, against the
supply of bad material for their work. But we cannot
seriously regard, as in any way analogous to the Trade
Union Movement of to-day, the innumerable rebelUons of
subject races, the slave insurrections, and the semi-ser\dle
peasant revolts of which the annals of history are full. These
forms of the " labour war " fall outside our subject, not
only because they in no case resulted in permanent asso-
ciations, but because the " strikers " were not seeking to
improve the conditions of a contract of service into which
they voluntarily entered.
When, however, we pass from the annals of slavery or
serfdom to those of the nominally free citizenship of the
mediaeval town, we are on more debatable ground. We
make no pretence to a thorough knowledge of English
town-life in the Middle Ages. But it is clear that there
were at times, alongside of the independent master crafts-
men, a number of hired journeymen and labourers, who are
known to have occasionally combined against their nilers
and governors. These combinations are stated sometimes
to have lasted for months, and even for years. As earl}'
as 1383 we find the Corporation of the City of London
prohibiting all " congregations, covins, and conspiracies of
workmen." In 1387 the serving-men of the London cord-
Journeymen Fraternities 3
wainers, in rebellion against the " overseers of the trade," ^
are reported to be aiming at making a permanent fraternity.
Nine years later the ser\dng-men of the saddlers, " called
yeomen," assert that they have had a fraternity of their
own, " time out of mind," with a livery and appointed
governors. The masters declared, however, that the
association was only thirteen years old, and that its object
was to raise wages. ^ In 1417 the tailors' " serving men
and journeymen " in London have to be forbidden to dwell
apart from their masters as they hold assembhes and have
formed a kind of association.^ Nor were these fraternities
confined to London. In 1538 the Bishop of Ely reports to
Cromwell that twenty -one joume\Tnen shoemakers of
Wisbech have assembled on a hill without the town, and
sent three of their number to summon aU the master shoe-
makers to meet them, in order to insist upon an advance in
their wages, threatening that " there shall none come into
the town to serve for that wages within a twelve month and
a day, but we woU have an harme or a legge of hjon, except
they woU take an othe as we have doon." *
These instances derived from the very fragmentary
materials as yet printed, suggest that a more complete
examination of the unpubhshed archives might possibly
disclose a whole series of journeymen fraternities, and
enable us to determine the exact constitution of these
associations. It is, for instance, by no means clear whether
the instances cited were strikes against employers, or revolts
against the authority of the gild. Our impression is that
the case of the Wisbech shoemakers, and possibly some of
^ Riley's Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries (1888), p. 495 (partly cited in Trade
Unions, by WilUam Trant, 1884).
2 Ibid. pp. 542-3.
^ Ibid. p. 609 ; Clode's Early History of the Merchant Taylors' Com-
pany, vol. i. p. 63.
* Calendars of State Papers : Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic,
Henry VIII. vol. xiii. part i,, 1538, No. 1454, p. 537. Compare the
ephemeral combinations cited by Fagniez, Etudes stir I'industrie et la classe
industrielle a Paris (Paris, 1877), pp. 76, 82, etc.
4 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the others, represent the embryo stage of a Trade Union.
Supposing, therefore, that further investigation were to
prove that such ephemeral combinations by hired journey-
men against their employers did actually pass into durable
associations of like character, we should be constrained to
begin our history with the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
But, after detailed consideration of every published instance
of a journeyman's fraternity in England, we are fully
convinced that there is as yet no evidence of the existence
of any such durable and independent combination of wage-
earners against their employers during the Middle Ages.
There are certain other cases in which associations during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which are sometimes
assumed to have been composed of journej^men,^ maintained
^ It has been assumed that, in the company of " Bachelors " or
"Yeomen Tailors" connected with the Merchant Taylors' Company of
London between 1446 and 1661, we have " for the first time reveakil to
us the existence, and something of the constitution, of a journeyman's
society which succeeded in maintaining itself for a prolonged period."
More careful examination of the materials from which this vivid picture
of this supposed journeyman's society has been drawn leads us to beheve
that it was not composed of journeymen at all, but of masters. This
niiKht, in the first place, have been inferred from the fact that in the
ranks of the supposed journeymen were to be found opulent leaders hke
Richard Hilles, the friend of Cranmer and Bullinger, who " became a
I^achelor in Budge of the Yeoman Company" in 1535 (Clode, Early
History of the Merchant Taylors' Company, vol. ii. p. 64), and Sir Leonard
Halliday, afterwards Lord Mayor, who was in the Bachelors' Company
from 1572 to 1594, when " he was elected a member of the higher hierarchy
of the Corporation " (ibid. p. 237). The Bachelors' Company, indeed, far
from being composed of needy wage-earners, bore the greater part of the
expense of the pageant in connection with the mayoralty, and managed
the whole proceedings. The Bachelors "in Foynes " and those " in
Budge " arc all named as marching in the procession in " gownes to be
welted with velvet, and there jackyttes, cassockes, and doublettes to be
either of satten damaske, tailataye " (ibid. pp. 262-6). And when, in
1609, the Company was assessed to contribute to the Plantation of Ulster,
the Bachelors contributed nearly as much as the merchants (;^I55, 10-
from ten members as compared with 1^187, los. from nine member. •>
(ibid. vol. i. pp. 327-9)). Whether the Bachelors' Company ever included
any large proportion of hired journeymen appears extremely doubtful,
though its object was clearly the regulation of the trade. The members,
according to the Ordinance of 1613, paid a contribution of 2s. 2d. a
quarter " for the poor of the fraternity." This may be contrasted with
the quarterage of 8d. a year or 2d. per quarter, levied, according to order
of August 1578, on every servant or journeyman free of the City. The
Bachelors' Companies 5
a continuous existence. But in all these cases, so far as we
have been able to investigate them, the " Bachelors' Com-
pany," presumed to be a journeymen's fraternity, formed a
subordinate department of the masters' gild, by the rulers
of which it was governed. It will be obvious that associa-
tions in which the employers dispensed the funds and
appointed the officers can bear no analogy to modem Trade
Unions. Moreover, these " yeoman " organisations or
funds of the two companies were kept distinct, but frequent donations
were made from one to the other, and not only from the inferior to the
superior {ibid. vol. i. pp. 67-9). That the Bachelors' Company was by
no means confined to journeymen is clear. Sir Leonard Halhday, for
instance, became a freeman in April 1564 on completing his apprentice-
ship, and at once set up in business for himself, obtaining a charitable
loan for the purpose. Yet, although he prospered in business, " in 1572
we find him assessed as in the Bachelors' Company," and he was not
elected to the superior company until 1594 {ibid. vol. ii. p. 237). And in
the Ordinance of 1507, " for all those persons that shall be abled by the
maister and Wardeins to holde hous or shop open," it is provided that
the person desiring to set up shop shall not only pay a licence fee, but
also " for his incomyng to the bachelers' Company and to be broder with
theym iij^ iii'^ " (Clode, Memorials of the Merchant Taylors' Company,
p. 209). Nor do the instances of its action imply that it had at heart
the interest of the wage-earners, as distinguished from that of the em-
ployers. The hostihty to foreigners, the desire to secure government
clothing contracts, and the preference for a Umitation of apprentices to
two for each employer are all consistent with the theory that the Bachelors'
Company was, hke its superior, composed of masters, probably less opulent
than the governing clique, and perhaps occupied in tailoring rather than
in the business of a clothier or merchant. It is not until 1675 and 1682
that can be traced in the MS. records of the Clothworkers' Company the
existence of distinctively journeymen's combinations {Industrial Organisa-
tion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904,
p. 199). The other instances of identification of " Bachelors' Companies "
or " Yeomen " organisation with journeymen's societies are no more
convincing than that of the Merchant Taylors. That the " valets,"
serving-men, or journeymen in many trades possessed some kind of
" almsbox," or charitable funds of their own is indeed clear, but that
this was ever used in trade disputes, or was independent of the masters'
control, must at present be regarded as highly improbable. The strongest
instance of independence is that of the Oxford cordwainers {Selections
from the Records of the City of Oxford, by William H. Turner, Oxford,
1880). See, on the whole subject, the chapter on " Mediasval Journeymen's
Clubs," in Sir WiUiam Ashley's Surveys : Historic and Economic, 1900 ;
Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by
Professor George Unwin, 1904 ; and an article on "The Origin of Trade
Unionism," by Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, in the Economic Review, April 1895
(vol. v.).
6 The Origins of Trade Unionism
" Bachelors' Companies " do not appear to have long sur-
vived the sixteenth century.
The explanation of the tardy growth of stable independ-
ent combination among hired journeymen is, we believe, to
be found in the prospects of economic advancement which
the skilled handicraftsman still possessed. We do not wisli
to suggest the existence of any Golden Age in which each
skilled workman was his own master, and the^wage system
was unknown. The earliest records of English town history
imply the presence of hired journeymen, who were not
always contented with their wages. But the apprenticed
journeyman in the skilled handicrafts belonged, until com-
paratively modern times, to the same social grade as his
employer, and was indeed usually the son of a master in
the same or an analogous trade. So long as industry was
carried on mainly by small masters, each employing but one
or two journe3mien, the period of any energetic man's service
as a hired wage-earner cannot normally have exceeded a
few years, and the industrious apprentice might reasonably
hope, if not always to marry his master's daughter, at any
rate to set up in business for himself. Any incipient organ-
isation would always be losing its oldest and most capable
members, and would of necessity be confined, hke the
Coventry journeymen's Gild of St. George, to " the young
people," ^ or like the ephemeral fraternity of journeymen
tailors of 1415-17, to " a race at once youthful and un-
stable," 2 from whose inexperienced ranks it would be hard
to draw a supply of good Trade Union leaders. We are
therefore able to understand how it is that, whilst industrial
oppression belongs to all ages, it is not until the changing
conditions of industry had reduced to an infinitesimal chance
the journeyman's prospect of becoming himself a master,
that wc find the passage of ephemeral combinations into
permanent trade societies. This inference is supported by
^ Dugdale's Anliqiiities of Warwickshire (1656), p. 125.
" Riley's Memorials, p. 653 ; Clode, Early History of Merchant Tuvli^rs'
Company, vol. i. p. 63.
Piecers' Associations y
the experience of an analogous case in the Lancashire of
to-day. The " piecers," who assist at the " mules," are
employed and paid by the operative cotton-spinners under
whom they work. The " big piecer " is often an adult man,
quite as skilled as the spinner himself, from whom, how-
ever, he receives very inferior wages. But although the
cotton operatives display a remarkable aptitude for Trade
Unionism, attempts to form an independent organisation
among the piecers have invariably failed. The energetic
and competent piecer is always looking forv^-ard to becoming
a spinner, interested rather in reducing than in raising
piecers' wages. The leaders of any incipient movement
among the piecers have necessarily fallen away from it on
becoming themselves employers of the class from which they
have been promoted. But though the Lancashire piecers
have always failed to form an independent Trade Union,
they are not without their associations, in the constitution
of which we may find some hint of the relation between the
gild of the master craftsmen and the Bachelors' Company
or other subordinate association in which journeymen may
possibl3^ have been included. The. spinners have, for their
own purposes, brigaded the piecers into piecers' associations.
These associations, membership of which is usually compul-
sory, form a subordinate part of the spinners' Trade Union,
the officers of which fix and collect the contributions, draw
up the rules, dispense the funds, and in every way manage
the affairs, without in the slightest degree consulting the
piecers themselves. It is not difficult to understand that the-
master craftsmen who formed the court of a mediaeval gild
might, in a similar way, have found it convenient to brigade
the journeymen or other inferior members of the trade into a
subordinate fraternity, for which they fixed the quarterly dues,
appointed the "wardens" or "wardens' substitutes," adminis-
tered the funds, and in every way controlled the affairs, with-
out admitting the j ourneymen to any voice in the proceedings. ^
^ Compare Fagniez, Etudes sur I'industrie et la classe industrielle d
Paris (Paris, 1877), p. 123.
8 The Origins of Trade Unionism
If further proof were needed that it was the prospect of
economic advancement that hindered the formation of per-
manent combinations among the hired journeymen of the
Middle Ages, we might adduce the fact that certain classes
of skilled manual workers, who had no chance of becoming
employers, do appear to have succeeded in establishing
long-lived combinations which had to be put down by law.
The masons, for instance, had long had their " 3'early con-
gregations and confederacies made in their general chapiters
assembled," which were expressly prohibited by Act of
Parliament in 1425. ^ And the tilers of Worcester are
ordered by the Corporation in 1467 to " sett no parliament
amonge them." ^ It appears probable, indeed, that the
masons, wandering over the country from one job to another,
were united, not in any local gild, but in a trade fraternity
of national extent. Such an association may, if further re-
searches throw light upon its constitution and working, not
improbably be found to possess some points of resemblance
to the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons of the
present day, which was established in 1832. But, unlike
the operative in the modern building trades, the mason of
the Middle Ages served, not a master entrepreneur, but the
customer himself, who provided the materials, supervised
the work, and engaged, at specified daily rates, both the
skilled mechanics and their labourers or apprentices.^ In
contrast with the handicraftsmen of the towns, the masons,
tilers, etc., remained, from the completion of their apprentice-
ship to the end of their working lives, in one and the same
economic position, a position which appears to have been
intermediate between those of the master craftsman and
the journeyman of the other trades. Like the jobbing
carpenter of the country village of to-day, they were in-
dependent producers, each controlling the processes of his
^ 3 Henry VI. c. i ; see also 34 Edward III. c. 9.
^ " Ordinances of Worcester," Art. Ivii. in Toulmin Smith's English
Gilds, p. 391).
^ Compare the analogous instances given by Fagniez, Eludes sur
I'industrie et la classe industrielle d Paris, p. 203 (Paris, 1877).
MedicBval Building Trades 9
own craft, and dealing directly with the customer. But
unUke the typical master craftsman of the handicraft trades
they sold nothing but labour, and their own labour only,
at regulated customary rates, and were unconcerned, there-
fore, with the making of profit, whether upon the purchase
and sale of materials or upon the hiring of subordinate
workers.^ The stabihty of their combinations was accord-
ingly not prevented by those influences which, as we have
suggested, proved fatal in England to the corresponding
attempts of the hired journeymen of the handicrafts.
But if the example of the building trades in the Middle
Ages supports our inference as to the cause of the tardy
growth of combination among the journeymen in other
trades, the " yearly congregations and confederacies " of
the masons might themselves demand our attention as
instances of early Trade Unionism. Of the constitution,
function, or ultimate development of these mediaeval asso-
ciations in the building trades we know unfortunately next
to nothing. 2 It is remarkable that there is, so far as we are
aware, no trace of their existence in Great Britain later
than the fifteenth century. During the eighteenth century
there is, as we shall see, no lack of information as to com-
binations of workmen in nearly every other skilled trade.
The employers appear to have been perpetually running to
Parliament to complain of the misdeeds of their workmen.
But of combinations in the building trades we have found
scarcely a trace until the very end of that century. If,
therefore, adhering strictly to the letter of our definition,
we accepted the masons' confederacy as a Trade Union,
we should be compelled to regard the building trades as
presenting the unique instance of an industry which had
^ Dr. Brentano has noticed (p. 8i) that the great majority of the
legal regulations of wages in the Middle Ages relate (if not to agriculture)
to the building trades ; and it may be that these were, like modern cab-
fare regulations, intended more for the protection of the customer than
for that of the capitalist.
^ See " Notes on the Organisation of the Mason's Craft in England,"
by Dr. William Cunningham (British Academy Proceedings).
B 2
10 The Origins of Trade Unionism
a period of Trade Unionism in the fifteenth century, then
passed for several centuries into a condition in which Trade
Unionism was impossible, and finally changed once more
to a state in which Trade Unions flourished. Our own
impression is however that the " congregations and con-
federacies " of the masons are more justly to be considered
the embryonic stage of a gild of master craftsmen than of
a Trade Union. There appears to us to be a subtle dis-
tinction between the economic position of workers who
hire themselves out to the individual consumer direct,
and those who, Uke the tjrpical Trade Unionist of to-day,
serve an employer who stands between them and the actual
consumers, and who hires their labour in order to make
out of it such a profit as will provide him with his interest
on capital and " wages of management." We suggest
that, with the growing elaboration of domestic architecture,
the superior craftsmen tended more and more to become
employers, and any organisations of such craftsmen to pass
insensibly into the ordinary type of masters' gild.^ Under
such a system of industry the journeymen would possess
the same prospects of economic advancement that hindered
the growth of stable combinations in the ordinary handi-
crafts, and in this fact may lie the explanation of the striking
absence of evidence of any Trade Unionism in the building
trades right down to the eighteenth century.- Wlien, how-
* Such a master craftsmen's society we see in the Masons' " Lodge of
Atchison's Haven," which, on December 27, 1735, passed the following
resolution : " The Company of Atchison's Haven being raett together,
have found Andrew Kinghorn guilty of a most atrocious crime against
the whole Trade of Masonry, and he not submitting himself to the Com-
pany for taking his work so cheap that no man could have his bread nf
it. Therefore in not submitting himself he has excluded himself from the
said Company ; and therefore the Company doth hereby enact that no
man, neither fellow craft nor enter'd prentice after this shall work as
journeyman under the said Andrew Kinghorn, under the penalty of being
cut ofl as well as he. Likewise if any man shall follow the example of the
said Andrew Kinghorn in taking work at eigiit pounds Scots per rood
the walls being twenty feet high, and rebates at eighteen pennies Scots
per foot, that they shall be cut off in the .same manner" (Sketch of thr In-
corporation of Maions, by James Cruikshank, Glasgow, 1S79, pp. 131. 13::).
* Thorold Rogers points out that the .Merton College bell-tower was
Watermen's Societies ii
ever, the capitalist builder or contractor began to supersede
the master mason, master plasterer, etc., and this class of
small entrepreneurs had again to give place to a hierarchy
of hired workers. Trade Unions, in the modern sense, began,
as we shall see, to arise. "Just as we found the small
master in the sixteenth century struggling to adapt and
appropriate the traditions of the superseded handicraft
organisation, so we shall find the journeyman at the close
of the seventeenth century [in some trades arid at the close
of the eighteenth century in others] endeavouring to build
up a new status out of the ruins of the small master," ^
We have dwelt at some length upon these ephemeral
associations of wage-earners and on the journeymen frater-
nities of the Middle Ages, because it might plausibly be
argued that they were in some sense the predecessors of
the Trade Union. But strangely enough it is not in these
institutions that the origin of Trade Unionism has usually
been sought. For the predecessor of the modem Trade
built in 1448-50 by direct employment at wages. The new quadrangle,
early in the seventeenth century, was put out to contract with a master
mason and a master carpenter respectively, but the college still suppHed
all the material {History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. pp. 258-60 ;
iii. pp. 720-37 ; V. pp. 478, 503, 629).
^ Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by
George Unwin, 1904, p. 201. In this connection may be mentioned the
London watermen, who have always dealt directly with their customers,
and who possess a tradition of having been continuously organised since
1350. Power to regulate the trade of watermen was, in 1555, conferred
by Act of Parhament upon the then incorporated Thames Watermen and
Lightermen's Company, the administration of which appears to have
been, from the first, entirely in the hands of the master lightermen. The
watermen, who had no masters, were compelled to take out the freedom
of this Company, and the existing Trade Union, the Amalgamated Society
of Watermen and Lightermen, was established in 1872 for the express
purpose of obtaining some representation of the working watermen and
the journeymen lightermen on the Court of the Company. Previous
associations of working watermen for trade purposes seem to have been
in existence in 1789 (a Rotherhithe Society of Watermen) and in 1799
(Friendly Society of Watermen usually plying at the Hermitage Stairs,
in the parish of St. John, Wapping) ; and Mayhew describes, in 1850,
local " turnway societies," regulating the sharing of custom, and a Water-
men's Protective Society, to resist non-freemen {London Labour and the
London Poor, 1851).
12 The Origins of Trade Unionism
Union, men have turned, not to the mediaeval associations
of the wage-earners, but to those of their employers — that
is to say, the Craft Gilds.^ The outward resemblance of
the Trade Union to the Craft Gild had long attracted the
attention, both of the friends and the enemies of Trade
Unionism ; but it was the publication in 1870 of Professor
Brentano's brilliant study on the " Origin of Trades Unions "
that gave form to the popular idea.^ Without in the least
implying that any connection could be traced between the
mediaeval gild and the modern Trade Union, Dr. Brentano
suggested that the one was in so far the successor of the
other, that both institutions had arisen " under the breaking
up of an old system, and among the men suffering from
this disorganisation, in order that they might maintain
independence and order." ^ And when George Howell
^ Schanz, however, in his Zur Geschichte der deutschen Gesellenver-
hcinde (Leipzig, 1877), suggests that the associations of journeymen which
flourished in Germany side by side with the Craft Gilds prior to the
Thirty Years' War (1618) were, in fact, virtually Trade Unions. Compare
Schmoller's Strasshurger Tucker- und Weberzunft (Strassburg, 1879). Pro-
fessor G. Des Marez, the learned archivist of Brussels, supphes evidence
of the persistence of journeymen's organisations in Belgium, resembhng
those of Germany, down to the beginning of the sixteenth centurj' ; and
of the rise of new ones towards the end of the seventeenth century, without
trace of continuity (in Le Compagnonnage des chapeliers bruxellois, Brussels,
igog. See Professor Unwin's article in English Historical Review (October
igio) ; and compare Les Compagnonnages des arts et mitiers d Dijon aiix
xvii^ et xviii" sidcles, by H. House, 1909, and EnquStes sur les associations
professionnelles d'artisans et oitvriers en Belgique, by E. Vandervelde,
1891.
2 Dr. Brentano's essay was originally prefixed to Toulmin Smith's
English Gilds, published by the Early English Text Society in 1S70. It
was republished separately as The History and Development of Gilds and
the Origin of Trades Unions (135 pp., 1870), and it is to this edition that
we refer. Dr. Brentano's larger work, Die Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart
(Leipzig, 2 vols., 1871-72), includes this essay, and also his article in the
North British Review for October 1870 on " The Growth of a Trades
Union." It is only fair to say that in this, the ablest study of English
Trade Union history down to that time. Dr. Brentano lent no support to
the popular idea of any actual descent of the Trade Unions from the gilds.-
The Cobden Club Essays (1872) contain a good article on Trade Unions,
by Joseph Gostick, in which it is argued that these associations were, in
England, unknown before the eighteenth century, and had no connection
with the gilds.
3 Page 102.
No direct affiliation 13
prefixed to his history of Trade Unionism a paraphrase
of Dr. Brentano's account of the gilds, it became commonly
accepted that the Trade Union had, in some undefined way,
really originated from the Craft Gild.^ We are therefore
under the obligation of digressing to examine the relation
between the mediaeval gild and the modern Trade Union.
If it could be shown that the Trade Unions were, in any
way, the descendants of the old gilds, it would clearly be
the origin of the latter that we should have to trace.
The supposed descent in this country of the Trade
Unions from the mediaeval Craft Gilds rests, as far as we
have been able to discover, upon no evidence whatsoever.
The historical proof is all the other way. In London, for
instance, more than one Trade Union has preserved an
unbroken existence from the eighteenth century. The
Craft Gilds still exist in the City Companies, and at no
point in their history do we find the slightest evidence of
the branching off from them of independent journeymen's
societies. By the eighteenth century the London journey-
men had in nearly all cases lost whatever participation
they may possibly once have possessed in the Companies,
^ The first hundred pages of George Howell's Conflicts of Capital and
Labour (first fidition, 1877 ; second edition, 1890) are a close paraphrase
of Dr. Brentano's essay, practically the whole of which appears, often in
the same words, as Howell's own. But already in 1871 Dr. Brentano,
in his Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart (vol. i. ch. iii. p. 83), expressly connected
the Trade Unions, like Schanz, not with the gilds, but with the Journey-
men Fraternities, which he suggests may have " awaked under changed
circumstances to new strength and life, and to a new policy." We gather
that Sir William Ashley inclines to this view. " My own impression,"
he says, " is that we shall by and by find that, like the usages
of the German journeymen in the eighteenth century that centred
into Herbergen, the trade clubs of eighteenth century England were
broken-down survivals from an earlier period, undergoing, with the advent
of the married journeyman and otller causes, the slow transformation
from which they emerged in the nineteenth century as the nuclei of the
modern Trade Union." Sir William Ashley does not assert that any con-
tinuity of organisation can be proved. " What is suggested is only that
the habit of acting together in certain ways, which we find to characterise
the journeymen of the eighteenth century, had been formed in a much
earlier period" {Surveys: Historic and Economic, by Sir William Ashley,
1900).
14 The Origins of Trade Unionism
which had for the most part already ceased to have any
connection with the trades of which they bore the names>
It is sometimes suggested that the London Companies have
had an exceptional history, and that in towns in which
the gilds underwent a more normal development they may
have given rise to the modem trade society. So far as
Great Britain is concerned we have satisfied ourselves that
this suggestion rests on no better foundation than the other.
Neither in Bristol nor in Preston, neither in Newcastle nor
in Glasgow, have we been able to trace the slightest con-
nection between the slowly dying gilds and the upstarting
Trade Unions. At Sheffield J. M. Ludlow, basing himself
on an account by Frank Hill, once expressly declared ^
that direct affiliation could be proved.' Diligent inquiry
into the character and history of the still flourishing Cutlers'
Company demonstrates that this exclusively masters'
association at no time originated or engendered any of the
numerous Trade Unions with which Sheffield abounds.
There remains the case of Dublin, where some of the older
unions themselves claim descent from the gilds. Here,
too, careful search reveals, not only the absence of any
affiliation or direct descent, but also the impossibility of
any organic connection between the exclusively Protestant
gilds which were not abolished until 1842, and the mainly
Roman Catholic Trade Unions which attained their greatest
influence many years before.^ We assert, indeed, with
some confidence, that in no case did any Trade Union in
the United Kingdom arise, either directly or indirectly,
by descent, from a Craft Gild.
^ So long as the Companies continued to exercise any jurisdiction
over their trades, we find them (as in the cases of the London Frame-
work-knitters and the Dubhn Silkweavers) supported by any workmen's
combinations that existed. In exceptional instances, such as the London
Brushmakers, Basketmakers, and Watermen, we find this aJhance for the
exclusion of " illegal men " continuing into the nineteenth century, and
(as regards the Watermen) down to the present time.
^ MacmiUfm's Magazine (February 1861), relying on the Social Science
Report on Irade Societies and Strikes (i860), p. 521.
' See Appendix On the Assumed Connection between the Trade Unions
and the Gilds in Dublin.
Craft Gilds 15
It is often taken for granted that the Trade Union,
whatever may have been its origin, represents the same
elements, and plays the same part in the industrial system
of the nineteenth century, as the Craft Gild did in that of
the Middle Ages. A brief analysis of what is known of
the gilds will be sufficient to show that these organisations
were even in their purest days essentially different, both
in structure and function, from the modem trade society.
For the purpose of this comparison it will be unnecessary
for us to discuss the rival theories of historians as to the
nature and origin of the Craft Gilds. We may agree,
on the one hand, with Dr. Brentano ^ in maintaining that
the free craftsmen associated in order to stop the deteri-
oration of their condition and encroachments on their
earnings, and to protect themselves against " the abuse
of power on the part of the lords of the town, who tried
to reduce the free to the dependence of the unfree." On
the other hand, we may believe with Dr. Cunningham -
that the Craft Gilds were " called into being, not out of
antagonism to existing authorities, but as new institutions,
to which special parts of their own duties were delegated
by the burgh of&cers or the local Gild Merchant," as a
kind of " poUce system," in fact, by which the community
controlled the local industries in the interest of the con-
sumer. Or again, we may accept the middle view advanced
by Sir WilUam Ashley,^ that the gilds were self-governing
bodies of craftsmen, initiating their own trade regulations,
the magistrates or town council having a real, if some-
what vague, authority to sanction or veto these ordinances
for the good of the citizens. Each of these three views is
supported by numerous instances, and to determine which
theory represents the rule and which the exception would
involve a statistical knowledge of Craft Gilds for which
^ Gilds and Trade Unions (1870), p. 54.
2 History of Industry and Commerce, vol. i. p. 310. Dr. Gross, in his
Gild Merchant, apparently takes a similar view.
^ See his Introduction to Economic History and Theory, vol. i. (1891);
vol. ii. (1893) ; see also his Surveys: Historic and Economic (1900).
i6 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the material has not yet been collected. It will be evident
that, if Dr. Cunningham's theory of the Craft Gild is the
correct one, there can be no essential resemblance between
these semi-municipal bodies and the Trade Unions of to-
day. Dr. Brentano, however, produces ample evidence
that, in some cases at any rate, the gilds acted, not with
any view to the protection of the consumer, but, like the
Trade Unions, for the furtherance of the interests of their
own members— that is, of one class of producers. Accepting
for the moment the view that the Craft Gild, Hke the Trade
Union, or the Employers' Association, belonged to the
genus of " associations of producers," let us examine briefly
how far the gild was similar to modern combinations of
wage-earners.
Now, the central figure of the gild organisation, in all
instances, and at all periods of its development, was the
master cr-Aftsman, owning the instruments of production,
and selHng the product. Opinions may differ as to the
position of the journeymen in the gild or to the extent of
the prevalence of subordinate or semi-servile labour outside
it. Different view^ may be entertained as to the reaUty
of that regard for the interests of the consumer which forms
the ostensible object of many gild ordinances. But through-
out the whole range of gild history the master craftsman,
controlling the processes and seUing the products of the
labour of his httlc industrial group, was the practical ad-
ministrator of, and the dominant influence in, the gild system.^
In short, the typical gild member was not wholly, or even
chiefly, a manual worker. From the first he supphed not
only whatever capital was needed in his industry, but also
that knowledge of the markets for both raw material and
^ Dr. Brentano himself makes this clear. " We must not forget that
these gilds were not unions of labourers in the present sense of the word,
but of persons who, with the help of some stock, carried on their craft
on their own account. The gild contests were, consequently, not contests
for acquiring political equality for labour and property, but for the re-
cognition of political equality of trade stock and real property in the
towns " {Gilds and Trade Unions, p. 73).
Employers Associations 17
product, and that direction and control which are the special
functions of the entrepreneur. The economic functions
and pohtical authority of the gild rested, not upon its
assumed inclusion of practically the whole body of manual
workers, but upon the presence within it of the real directors
of industry of the time. In the modem Trade Union, on
the contrary, we find, not an association of entrepreneurs,
themselves controlling the processes of their industry, and
selling its products, but a combination of hired wage-workers,
serving under the direction of industrial captains who are
outside the organisation. The separation into distinct
social classes of the capitalist and the brain worker on the
one hand, and the manual workers on the other— the sub-
stitution, in fact, of a horizontal for a vertical cleavage of
society — vitiates any treatment of the Trade Union as the
analogue of the Craft Gild.
On the other hand, to regard the typical Craft Gild as
the predecessor of the modern Employers' Association or
capitahst syndicate would, in our opinion, be as great a
mistake as to believe, with George Howell, that it was the
" early prototype " of the Trade Union. Dr. Brentano
himself laid stress on the fact, afterwards brought into
special prominence by Dr. Cunningham, that the Craft
Gild was looked upon as the representative of the interests,
not of any one class alone, but of the three distinct and
somewhat antagonistic elements of modem society, the
capitahst entrepreneur, the manual worker, and the con-
sumer at large. We do not need to discuss the soundness
of the mediaeval lack of faith in unfettered competition as
a guarantee of the genuineness and good quaUty of wares.
Nor are we concerned with their assumption of the identity
of interest between all classes of the community. It seemed
a matter of course to the statesman, no less, than to the
pubUc, that the leading master craftsmen of the town
should be entrusted with the power and the duty of seeing
that neither themselves nor their competitors were per-
mitted to lower the standard of production. " The
1 8 The Origins of Trade Unionism
Fundamental Ground," says the petition of the Carpenters'
Company in 1681, " of Incorporating Handicraft Trades
and Manual Occupations into distinct Companies was to
the end that all Persons using such Trades should be brought
into one Uniform Government and Corrected and Regulated
by Expert and Skilful Governors, under certain Rules and
Ordinances appointed to that purpose." ^ The leading
men of the gild became, in effect, officers of the munici-
pality, charged with the protection of the public from
adulteration and fraud. When, therefore, we remember
that the Craft Gild was assumed to represent, not only
all the grades of producers in a particular industry, but also
the consumers of the product, and the community at large,
the impossibility of finding, in modern society, any single
inheritor of its multifarious functions will become apparent.
The powers and duties of the mediaeval gild have, in fact,
been broken up and dispersed. The friendly society and
^ Jupp's History of the Carpenters' Company, p. 313, second edition,
1848. In certain cases we see the workmen seeking incorporation as a
gild or company, in order that they might themselves lawfully regulate
their trades. Thus, in 1670 the wage-earning woodsawyers of the City
of London, who were employed by the members of the Carpenters', Joiners'
and Shipwrights' Companies,^ formally applied to the Corporation to be
made a Company. Their employers strongly objected, alleging that they
had already by combination raised their wages during the past quarter
of a century from 5s. to nearly los. per load ; that they were only day
labourers who worked on material provided by their employers, and
consequently not entitled to rank as masters ; and that if their com-
bination were recognised by incorporation they would be able to bring
the whole building trade to a standstill, as experience had already de-
monstrated even without incorporation. Moreover, their main object, it
was alleged, was to exclude from employment" all that sort of labourers
who daily resort to the City of London and parts adjacent, and by that
means keep the wages and prices of these sorts of labourers at an equal
and indifferent rate ; and then success would be an evil precedent, all
other labourers, the masons, bricklayers, plasterers, etc., having the same
reason to allege for incorporation " {Ibid. p. 307). The London coal-
porters in 1699 unsuccessfully petitioned the House of Commons that a
Bill might be passed to establish them as " a Fellowship in such govern-
ment and rules as sliall be thought meet " (House of Commons Journals,
vol. xiii. p. 69). Professor Unwin suggests that it was " by its failure along
these traditional lines " that " the wage-earning class was driven into
secret combinations, from the obscurity of which the Trade Unioi' did
not emerge till the 19th century " {Industrial Organisation in the i6th
and ijth Centuries, 1904).
Common Features 19
the Trade Union, the capitaUst syndicate and the employers'
association, the factory inspector and the Poor Law reheving
officer, the School Attendance officer, and the municipal
officers who look after adulteration and inspect our weights
and measures — all these persons, and institutions might,
with equal justice, be put forward as the successors of the
Craft Gild.i
Although there is an essential difference in the com-
position of the two organisations, the popular theory of
their resemblance is easily accounted for. First, there are
the picturesque Ukenesses which Dr. Brentano discovered
— the regulations for admission, the box with its three
locks, the common meal, the titles of the officers, and so
forth. But these are to be found in all kinds of associa-
tion in England. The Trade Union organisations share
them with the local friendly societies, or sick clubs, which
have existed all over England for the last two centuries.
Whether these features were originally derived from the
Craft Gilds or not, it is practically certain that the early
Trade Unions took them, in the vast majority of cases,
not from the traditions of any fifteenth-century organisa-
tion, but from the existing little friendly societies around
them. In some cases the parentage of these forms and
ceremonies might be ascribed with as much justice to the
mystic rites of the Freemasons as to the ordinances of the
Craft Gilds. The fantastic ritual pecuhar to the Trade
Unionism of 1829-34, which we shall describe in a subse-
quent chapter, was, as we shall see, taken from the cere-
monies of the Friendly Society of Oddfellows. But we
are informed that it bears traces of being an illiterate
copy of a masonic ritual. In our own times the " Free
^ " The Trade Union of to-day is often spoken of as the hneal de-
scendant of the ancient Craft Gilds. There is, however, no direct or
indirect connection between the ancient and modern forms of trade
combination. Beyond the fact that they each had for their objects the
estabhshment of certain trade regulations, and the provision of pertain
similar benefits, they had nothing in common." " Trade Unions as a
Means of Improving the Conditions of Labour," by John Burnett; pub-
lished in The Claims of Labour (Edinburgh, i^
20 The Origins of Trade Unionism
Colliers of Scotland," an early attempt at a national miners'
union, were organised into " Lodges " under a " Grand
Master," with much of the terminology and some of the
characteristic forms of Freemasonry. No one would,
however, assert any essential resemblance between the
village sick club and the trade society, still less between
Freemasonry and Trade Unionism. The only common
feature between all these is the spirit of association, clothing
itself in more or less similar picturesque forms.
But other resemblances between the gild and the union
brought out by Dr. Brentano are more to the point. The
fundamental purpose of the Trade Union is the protection
of the Standard of Life — that is to say, the organised
resistance to any innovation likely to tend to the degrada-
tion of the wage-earners as a class. That some social
organisation for the protection of the Standard of Life
was necessary was a leading principle of the Craft Gild,
as it was, in fact, of the whole mediaeval order. " Our
forefathers," wrote the Emperor Sigismund in 1434, " have
not been fools. The crafts have been devised for this
purpose : that everybody by them should earn his daily
bread, and nobody shall interfere with the craft of another.
By this the world gets rid of its misery, and every one may
find his livelihood." ^ But in this respect the Trade Union
does not so much resemble the Craft Gild, as reassert what
was once the accepted principle of mediaeval society, of
which the gild policy was only one manifestation. We do
not wish, in our historical survey of the Trade Union Move-
ment, to enter into the far-reaching controversy as to the
political validity either of the mediaeval theory of the com-
" To attempt to find an immediate connection between the Gild and
the Trade Union is like attempting to derive the English House of Commons
from the Saxon Witanagemot. In the one case as in the other the two
institutions were separated by centuries of development, and the earlier
one was dead before the later one was born " [Industrial Organisation
in the i6th and lyth Centuries, by Professor George Unwin, 1904, p. &).
^ Goldasti's Conslitutiones Imperiales, torn. iv. p. 189, quoted by
Dr. Brentano, p. 60.
Beginnings of Trade Unionism 21
pulsory maintenance of the Standard of Life, or of such
analogous modem expedients as Collective Bargaining on
the one hand, or Facton^ Legislation on the other. Nor
do we wish to imply that the mediaeval theory was at any
time so effectively and so sincereh' carried out as really to
secure to every manual worker a comfortable maintenance.
We are concerned only with the historical fact that, as we
shall see, the artisans of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries sought to perpetuate those legal or customary
regulations of their trade which, as they beheved, protected
their own interests. \Mien these regulations fell into disuse
the workers combined to secure their enforcement. WTien
legal redress was denied, the operatives, in many instances,
took the matter into their own hands, and endeavoured to
maintain, b}^ Trade Union regulations, what had once been
prescribed by law. In this respect, and practically in this re-
spect only, do we find any trace of the gild in the Trade Union.
Let us now turn from the hjnpothetical origin of Trade
Unionism to the recorded facts. We have failed to discover
in the manuscript records of companies or municipal cor-
porations, in the innumerable trade pamphlets and broad-
sheets of the time, or in the Journals of the House of
Commons, any evidence of the existence, prior to the latter
half of the seventeenth century,^ or indeed much before
'- A pamphlet of 1669 contains what appears at first sight to be a
mention of Trade Unionism. " The general conspiracy amongst artificers
and labourers is so apparent that mthin these twentj'^-five years the wages
of joiners, bricklayers, carpenters, etc., are increased, I mean within 40
miles of London (against all reason and good government), from eighteen
and twenty pence a daj-, to 2/6 and 3/-, and mere labourers from 10
and 12 pence a day unto 16 and 20 pence, and this not since the dreadful
fire of London only, but some time before. A joumejTnan shoemaker
has now in London (and proportionately in the country) 14 pence for
making that pair of shoes, which within these 12 years he made for 10
pence. . . . Nor has the increase of wages amongst us been occasioned
by quickness of trade and want of hands (as some do suppose) which are
indeed justifiable reasons, but through an exacting humour and evil
disposition in our people (hke our Gravesend watermen, who by some
temporary and mean pretences of the late Dutch war, have raised their
ferry double to what it was, and finding the sweet thereof, keep it up
still), that so they may live the better above their station, and work so
much the fewer days by how much the more they exact in their wages "
22 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the very close of that century, of continuous associations
of wage-earners for maintaining or improving the conditions
of their working Uves. And when we remember that during
the latter decades of the seventeenth century the employers
of labour, and especially the industrial " companies " or
corporations, memorialised the House of Commons on every
conceivable grievance which affected their particular trade,
the absence of all complaints of workmen's combinations
suggests to us that few, if any, such combinations existed.^
We do, however, discover in the latter half of the seventeenth
century various traces of sporadic combinations and associa-
tions, some of which appear to have maintained in obscurity
a continuous existence. In the early years of the eighteenth
century we find isolated complaints of combinations " lately
entered into " by the skilled workers in certain trades. As
the century progresses we watch the gradual multiplication
of these complaints, met by counter-accusations presented
by organised bodies of workmen. From the middle of the
century the Journals of the House of Commons abound in
petitions and counter-petitions revealing the existence of
journeymen's associations in most of the skilled trades.
And finally, we may infer the wide extension of the move-
ment from the steady multiplication of the Acts against
combinations in particular industries, and their culmination
in the comprehensive statute of 1799 forbidding all com-
binations whatsoever.
If we examine the evidence of the rise of combinations
in particular trades, we see the Trade Union springing,
{Usury at Six Per Cent. Examined, by Thomas Manley, London, i66g).
But we cannot infer from this unique and ambiguous passage anything
more than the possibihty of ephemeral combinations. It is significant
that Defoe, with all his detailed description of English industry in 1724,
does not mention any combinations of workmen.
^ In an able pamphlet dated 1681, entitled The Trade of England
Revived, it is stated that " we f annot make our English cloth so cheap as
they do in other countries, because of the strange idleness and stubborn-
ness of our poor," who insist on excessive wages. But the author attri-
butes this state of things, not to the existence of combinations, of which
he seems never to have licard, but to the Poor Law and the prevalence
of almsgiving.
The House of Call 23
not from any particular institution, but from every oppor-
tunity for the meeting together of wage-earners of the
same occupation. Adam Smith remarked that " people of
the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment
and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy
against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." ^
And there is actual evidence of the rise of one of the oldest
of the existing Trade Unions out of a gathering of the
joumejTnen " to take a social pint of porter together." -
More often it is a tumultuous strike, out of which grows
a permanent organisation. Elsewhere, as we shall see,
the workers meet to petition the House of Commons, and
reassemble from time to time to carry on their agitation
for the enactment of some new regulation, or the enforce-
ment of an existing law. In other instances we shall find
the journeymen of a particular trade frequenting certain
public-houses, at which they hear of situations vacant, and
the " house of call " becomes thus the nucleus of an organisa-
tion. Or we watch the journeymen in a particular trade
declaring that " it has been an ancient custom in the kingdom
of Great Britain for divers. Artists to meet together and
* Wealth of Nations, bk. i. ch. x. p. 59 of McCulloch's edition, 1863.
In an operative's description, dated 1809, of the gatherings of the Paisley
weavers, we see the Trade Union in the making. ' ' The Paisley operatives
are of a free, communicative disposition. They are fond to inform one
another in anything respecting trade, and in order to receive information
in a collective capacity they have, for a long course of years, associated in
a friendly manner in societies denominated clubs. . . . WTien met the
first hour is devoted to reading the daily newspapers out aloud. ... At
nine o'clock the chairman calls silence ; then the report of trade is heard.
The chairman reports first what he knows or what he has heard of such
a manufacturing house or houses, as wishing to engage operatives for
such fabric or fabrics ; Ukewise the price, the number of the yarn, etc.
Then each reports as he is seated ; so in the period of an hour not only
the state of the trade is known, but any difference that has taken place
between manufacturers and operatives " {An Answer to Mr. Carlile's
Sketches of Paisley, by Wilham Taylor, Paisley, 1809, pp. 15-17).
^ See Dunning's account of the origin of the Consohdated Society of
Bookbinders in 1779-80, in the Social Science Association's Report on
Trade Societies, i860, p. 93 ; also Workers on their Industries, edited by
F. W. Galton, 1895 ; Women in the Printing Trades, edited by J. R.
MacDonald, 1904, p. 30.
24 The Origins of Trade Unionism
unite themselves in societies to promote Amity and true
Christian Charity," and estabUshing a sick and funeral
club, which invariably proceeds to discuss the rates of
wages offered by the employers, and insensibly passes into
a Trade Union with friendly benefits.^ And if the trade
is one in which the journeymen frequently travel in search
of work, we note the slow elaboration of systematic arrange-
ments for the relief of these "tramps" by their fellow-
workers in each town through which they pass, and the
^ Articles of Agreement made and confirmed by a Society of Taylors,
begun March 25. 1760 (London, 1812). In 1790 Francis Place joined the
Breeches Makers' Benefit Society " for the support of the members when
sick and their burial when dead " — its real object being to support the
members "in a strike for wages " {Life of Francis Place, by Professor
Graham Wallas, new edition, 1918). Local friendly societies giving sick
pay and providing for funeral expenses had sprung up all over England
during the eighteenth century. Towards its close their number seems to
have rapidly increased until, in some parts at any rate, every village
ale-house became a centre for one or more of these humble and spontane-
ous organisations. The rules of upwards of a hundred of these societies,
dating between 1750 and 1820, and all centred round Newcastle-on-Tyne,
are preserved in the British Museum. At Nottingham, in 1794, fifty-six
of these clubs joined in the annual procession {Nottingham Journal,
June 1^, 1794). So long as they were composed indiscriminately of men
of all trades, it is probable that no distinctively Trade Union action could
arise from their meetings. But in some cases, for various reasons, such
as high contributions, migratory habits, or the danger of the calling, the
sick and burial club was confined to men of a particular trade. This
kind of friendly society frequently became a Trade Union. Some societies
of this type can trace their existence for nearly a century and a half.
The Glasgow coopers, for instance, have had a local trade friendly society,
confined to journeymen coopers, ever since 1752. The London Sailmakers
Burial Society dates from 1740. The Newcastle shoemakers established
a similar society as early as 1719 {Observations upon the Report from the
Select Committee of the House of Commons on the laivs respecting Friendly
Societies, by the Rev. J. T. Becher, Prebendary of Southwell, 1826). On
the occurrence of any dispute with the employers their funds, as this
contemporary observer in another pamphlet deplores, " have also too
frequently been converted into engines of abuse by paj'ing weekly suras
to artisans out of work, and have thereby encouraged combinations among
workmen not less injurious to the misguided members than to the Public
Weal " {Observations on the Rise and Progress of Friendly Societies, 1824,
p. 55). Similar friendly societies among workmen of particular trades
appear to have existed in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eightccntli
centuries, where they perhaps bridged the gap between the media>\al
fraternities and the modern Trade Unions (see review in the English His-
torical Review, October 1918, of P. J. Blok's Geschiedenes einer Hollandischen
Stad).
Tramping Societies 25
inevitable passage of this far-extending tramping society
into a national Trade Union. ^
All these, however, are but opportunities for the meeting
of journeymen of the 'same trade. They do not explain
the establishment of continuous organisations of the wage-
earners in the seventeenth and eighteenth rather than in
the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. The essential cause
of the growth of durable associations of wage-earners must
lie in something peculiar to the later centuries. This
fundamental condition of Trade Unionism we discover in
the economic revolution through which certain industries
were passing. In all cases in which Trade Unions arose,
^ Schanz {Gesellenverbande, p. 25) follows Brentano (p. 94) in attribut-
ing the formation of journeymen's fraternities in the Middle Ages mainly
to a desire to provide for the wandering craftsmen. The connection
between the " Herbergen " or " Schenken," designed to find lodging and
employment, with the journeymen's associations was certainly close.
(See Dr. Bruno Schoenlank's article in 1894, quoted in Sir William Ashley's
Surveys: Historic and Economic, 1900.) It may be suggested that the
contrast between the absence or scanty existence of such fraternities in
England and their spread in Germany is, perhaps, to be ascribed in some
measure to the fact that English journeymen seem never to have adopted
the German custom of " Wander jahre," or regular habit of spending, on
completing their apprenticeship, a few years in travelling about the
country to complete their training. When the local privileges of the old
gilds had fallen somewhat into abeyance, the restrictions of the successive
Settlement Acts must in England, to some extent, have checked the mobiUty
of labour. But, from the beginning of the eighteenth century at any
rate, we find it customary for journeymen of certain trades — it is to be
noticed that these are relatively new trades in England — to " tramp "
from town to town in search of work, and the description, subsequently
quoted, of the organisations of the wool-combers and worsted weavers in
1 74 1, shows that the relief of these travelhng journeymen was a prominent
object of the early unions. The hatters in the middle of the eighteenth
century had a regular arrangement for such rehef. The compositors at
the very beginning of the nineteenth century had already covered the
country with a network of local clubs, the chief function of which appears
to have been the facilitation of this wandering in search of work. And
the calico-printers had a systematic way of issuing a ticket which entitled
the tramp to collect from each journeyman, in any " print-field " that he
visited, at first a voluntary contribution, and latterly a fixed relief of a
halfpenny per head in England, and a penny per head in Scotland
(^Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee to whom the petition of the
several journeymen Calico printers and others working in that trade, etc.,
was referred, July 4, 1804, and the Report from that Committee, July 17,
1806).
26 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the great bulk of the workers had ceased to be independent \
producers, themselves controlling the processes, and owning '
the materials and the product of their labour, and had
passed into the condition of lifelong wage-earners, possessing .
neither the instruments of production nor the commodity ,
in its finished state. " From the moment that to establish
a given business more capital is required than a journeyman
can easily accumulate within a few years, gild mastership —
the mastership of the masterpiece — becomes Uttle more .
than a name. . . . Skill alone is valueless, and is soon
compelled to hire itself out to capital. . . . Now begins the
opposition of interest between employers and employed, :
now the latter begin to group themselves together ; now \
rises the trade society." ^ Or, to express this Industrial
Revolution in more abstract terms, we may say, in the
words of Dr. Ingram, that " the whole modem organisation j
of labour in its advanced forms rests on a fundamental fact
which has spontaneously and increasingly developed itself —
namely, the definite separation between the functions of
the capitalist and the workman, or, in other words, between
the direction of industrial operations and their execution
in detail." ^
It is often assumed that the divorce of the manual
worker from the ownership of the means of production
resulted from the introduction of machinery, the use of
power, and the factory system. Had this been the case we
should not, upon our hj^othesis, have expected to find .
Trade Unions, at an earlier date than factories, or in in-»/,
dustrics untransformcd by machinery. The fact that the
earliest durable combinations of wage-earners in England
precede the factory system by a whole centurj', and occur
in trades carried on exclusively by hand labour, reminds us
that the creation of a class of lifelong wage-servants came
about in more than one way.
' J. M. Ludlow, in article in MactniUan's Magazine, February iS6i.
* Work and the Workman, by Dr. J. K. Ingram (Address to the Trades i
Union Congress at Dublin, 1880). j
The Printers' Chapel 27
We may note, to begin with, the very old institution of
the printers' " chapel," with its " father " and " clerk,"
an informal association among the compositors of a par-
ticular establishment for the discussion and regulation, not
only of their own workshop conditions, but also of their
relations with the employer, who must, in early days, have
been a man of superior education, with an outlook much
wider than that of his journe5mien.
The " chapel " may possibly be nearly as old as the
introduction of printing into this country.^ We have no
evidence as to the date at which the " chapels " of different
printing offices entered into communication with each other
in London, so as to form a Trade Union. But already in
1666 we have The Case and Proposals of the Free Journeymen
Printers in and about London, in which they complain of the
multipUcation of apprentices and the prevalence of " turn-
overs " — grievances which vexed every compositors' Trade
Union throughout the nineteenth century. ^ \Miether the
" Free Journeymen Printers " managed to continue in
existence as a Trade Union is uncertain. We have found
no actual evidence of any other combination among com-
^ Benjamin Franklin mentions the " chapel " and its regulations in
1725. A copy, dated 1734, of the Rules and Orders to be observed by the
Members of this Chapel : by Compositors, by Pressmen, by. Both, is pre-
served in the Place MSS. 27799 — 88.
* This petition (in the British Museum) is printed in Brentano's Gilds
and Trade Unions, p. 97. Benjamin Franklin, who worked in London
printing offices in 1725, makes no mention of Trade Unionism. The
Stationers' Company continued, so far as the City of London was con-
cerned, to regulate apprenticeship; and we see it, in 1775, taking steps
to prevent employers having an undue number. Regulations agreed to
by the employers and the compositors, as to the rates of pay for different
kinds of work, can be traced back to 1785, at least. A copy of the rules
of " The Phoenix, or Society of Compositors " meeting at " The Hole in
the Wall " tavern. Fleet Street, shows that this organisation was " in-
stituted March 12th, 1792." In 1798 five members of the " Pressmen's
Friendly Society " were indicted for conspiracy in meeting for the purpose
of restricting the number of apprentices (they sought to limit them to
three for seven presses). Although the secretary to the " Society of
Master Printers " had requested these men to attend the meeting, in
order to get settled the pending dispute, they were convicted and sen-
tenced to two years' imprisonment (Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by
George Howell, 1890, p. 92).
28 The Origins of Trade Unionism
positors than the " chapel " earlier than the eighteenth
century.
One of the earliest proven cases of continuous associa-
tion among journeymen "is that of the hatters (or feltmakers),
whose combination — novy^ the Journeymen Hatters' Trade
Union of Great Britain and Ireland — may perhaps claim to
trace its ancestry from 1667, the very year in which the
Feltmakers' Company, consisting of their employers, obtained
a charter from Charles II. Within a few months the jour-
neymen in the various London workshops — each of which
had apparently a workshop organisation somewhat resem-
bling the printers' " chapel " — had combined to present a
petition to the Court of Aldermen against the Master,
Wardens and Assistants of the Company, The Court of
Aldermen decided that, in order " that the journeymen
may not by combination or otherwise excessively at their
pleasure raise their wages," a piecework list is to be annually
settled and presented for enactment by the Court of Alder-
men. The journeymen seem to have co-operated with the
employers in presenting this list, and in preventing the
employment of non-freemen. The rates fixed did not, how-
ever, always satisfy the journeymen, especially when the
employers were successful in getting them lowered ; and in
1696 we read of a deputation appearing before the Court to
declare that they had resolved among themselves not to
accept any less wages than they had formerly received, and
to ask for a revision of the order. They had, according to
the masters' statement, not confined themselves to peaceful
resolutions, but had made an example of a journe3'man
who had remained at work at the reduced rates. " They
stirred up the apprentices to seize upon him as he was
working, to tie him in a wheelbarrow, and in a tumultuous
and riotous manner to drive him through all the consider-
able places in London and Southwark." It was alleged
that the men were organised in " clubs," which " raised
several sums of money for the abetting and supporting such
of them who should desert their masters* service." In 1697
The Hatters 29
the employers introduced the " character note " or " leaving
certificate," the Company enacting that no master should
employ a journeyman who did not bring wAth. him a certifi-
cate from his previous employer. Successive prosecutions
of journeymen took place for refusing to work at the lawful
rates, but the workmen seem to have had good legal advice,
and to have defended themselves with skill. On one occasion
they pleaded guilty, and promised amendment and the
abandonment of their combination, whereupon the prosecu-
tion was withdrawn. On another occasion they got the
case removed by writ of certiorari from the Lord Mayor's
session to the Assizes, where Lord Chief Justice Holt re-
ferred the dispute to arbitration. The award of June 1699
was a virtual victory for the journeymen, after a three
years' struggle, as it gave them an increase of rates, with a
stoppage of all legal proceedings.^ That the London Trade
Clubs of the journeymen hatters, or at any rate their several
workshop organisations, maintained a continuous existence
we need not doubt ; though we do not hear of them again
until 1771, when they seem to have established a national
federation of the local trade clubs existing in more than a
dozen provincial towns with those of Southwark and the
West End of London, very largely for the purpose of main-
taining and enforcing the statutory limitation of apprentices.
In 1775 this federation appears to have been strong enough,
not only to obtain increased rates of wages, but also the
exclusive employment of " clubmen." There were " con-
gresses " of tlie hatters in 1772, 1775, and 1777, held in
London for the adoption of " byelaws " for the whole trade ;
but we beUeve that these " congresses " were attended by
delegates from the workshops in and near London only.
^ For this interesting case we are indebted to Professor George Unwin's
researches in the records of the Feltmakers' Company, whose "Court
Book " contains the record. See Industrial Organisation in the i6th and
lyth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904 ; "A Seventeenth-Century Trade
Union," by the same, in Economic Journal, 1910, pp. 394-403 ; the
chapter " Mediaeval Journeymen's Clubs " in Sir William Ashley's Surveys.
Historic and Economic, 1900.
30 The Origins of Trade Unionism
It is clear that similar organisations existed in the other towns
in which the trade was carried on. The members who were
unemployed " tramped " from town to town, and regula-
tions for their rehef were framed. A weekly contribution
of 2d. appears to have been paid by each member. The
employers successfully petitioned Parliament in 1777 for a
repeal of the old hmitation of apprentices and a renewed
prohibition of combination. ^
More definite evidence is afforded by the development of
the tailoring trade. In tailoring for rich customers the master
craftsmen appear at the very beginning of the eighteenth
century to have been recruited from the comparatively
small number of journeymen who acquired the specially
skilled part of the business — namely, the cutting-out. ^
" The tailor," says an eighteenth-century manual for the
young tradesman, " ought to have a quick eye to steal the
cut of a sleeve, the pattern of a flap, or the shape of a good
trimming at a glance, ... in the passing of a chariot, or
in the space between the door and a coach." There grew
up accordingly a class of mere sewers, " not one in ten "
knowing " how to cut out a pair of breeches : they are
employed only to sew the seam, to cast the buttonholes,
and prepare the work for the finisher. . . . Generally as
poor as rats, the House of Call runs away with all their
earnings, and keeps them constantly in debt and want." ^
^ House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. ; 8 Eliz. c. ii ; i James I.
c. 14 ; and 17 George III. c.55 ; Place MSS. 27799 — 68; Comraitfree on
Artisans and Machinery, 1824 ; Industrial Democracy, p. 11 ; "A Seven-
teenth Century Trade Union," by Professor George Unwin, in Econortiic
Journal, 1910, pp. 394-403 ; Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell,
1890, p. 83. The organisation evidently continued in existence, at least
in its local form ; but the existing national " Journeymen Hatters' Trade
Union of Great Britain and Ireland " claims to date only from 1798. In
1806 the Macclesfield hatters were indicted for conspiracy in striking
for higher wages, and sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment.
Particulars of this organisation will be found in The Trial of W. Davenport
. . . Hatters of Macclesfield for a Conspiracy against their Masters . . .
by Thomas Mulinoaux, 1806.
2 For the whole history of this industry, see The Tailoring Trade, by
F. W. Galton, 1896.
' The London Tradesman, by Campbell, 1747, p. 192.
The Capitalist Employers 31
This differentiation was promoted by the increasing need
of capital for successfully beginning business in the better
quarters of the metropolis. Already in 1681 the " shop-
keeping tailor " was deplored as a new and objectionable
feature, " for many remember when there were no new
garments sold in London (in shops) as now there are." ^
The " accustomed tailor," or working craftsman, making up
the customer's own cloth, objected to " taylers being sales-
men," pa3dng high rents for shops in fashionable neigh-
bourhoods, giving long credit to their aristocratic clients,
and each emplo5dng, in his own workshops, dozens or even
scores of journeymen, who were recruited from the houses
of call in times of pressure, and ruthlessly turned adrift
when the season was over. And although it remained pos-
sible in the reign of King WiUiam the Third, as it still is in
that of King George the Fifth, to start business in a back
street as an independent master tailor with no more capital
or skill than the average journeyman could command, yet
the making of the fine clothes worn by the Court and the
gentry demanded, then as now, a capital and a skill which
put this extensive and lucrative trade altogether out of the
reach of the thousands of journeymen whom it employed.
Thus we find that at the very beginning of the eighteenth
century the typical journeyman tailor in London and West-
minster had become a lifelong wage-earner. It is not sur-
prising, therefore, that one of the earUest instances of
permanent Trade Unionism that we have been able to dis-
cover occurs in this trade. The master tailors in 1720
complain to Parliament that " the JoumejTnen Ta3dors in
and about the Cities of London and Westminster, to the
number of seven thousand and upwards, have lately entered
into a combination to raise their wages and leave off working
an hour sooner than they used to do ; and for the better
carrying on their design have subscribed their respective
names in books prepared for that purpose, at the several
houses of call or resort (being publick-houses in and about
* The Trade of England Revived, 1681, p. 36.
32 The Origins of Trade Unionism
London and Westminster) which they use ; and collcxi
several considerable sums of money to defend any prosecu-
tions against them." ^ Parliament listened to the masters'
complaint, and passed the Act 7, Geo. I. st. i, c. 13,
restraining both the giving and the taking of wages in excess
of a stated maximum, all combinations being prohibited.
From that time forth the journeymen tailors of Lojidon and
Westminster have remained in effective though sometimes
informal combination, the organisation centring round the
fifteen or twenty " houses of call," being the public-houses
to which it was customary for the workmen to resort, and
at which the employers sought any additional men whom
the\' wished to engage. In 1744 the Privy Council was
set in motion against their refusal to obey the Act of
1720.2 In 1750-51 they invoked the assistance of the
Middlesex Justices, and obtained an order requiring the
masters to pay certain rates. In 1767 further legislation
was, in spite of their eloquent protests, obtained against
them.' In 1810 a master declared before a Select Com-
mittee that their combination had existed for over a
century.*
An equally early instance of permanent trade combina-
tion is the woollen manufacture of the West of England.
* House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. pp. 416. 424. 481 ; The Case
of the Master Taylors residing within the Cif ' ' ' - and Westminster,
in relation to the great abuses committeif by .' >i : An Abstract of
the Master Taylors' Bill before the Ilonout^- i ,,.... ■/ Comwois, uith the
Journeymen's Observation on each clause of the said Bill: The Case of the
Journeymen Taylors residing in the ('••"- •■" / .>ii,/ .u mj Westminster (all
I 7J0). These and other documents : ions in this trade
have now been published in a useful v \,- Trade, by F. W.
Galton. i8g6), with an elaborate bibliography.
■ London, by David Hu^hson (1821), pp. 392-3 : House of Commons
Journals, vol. xxiv. Place MSS. 27790, pp. 4, 5. The ^ Journeymen
Taylors in and about the Cities of London and Westmn i.irj- 7, 1 745).
' Gentlemen's Magazine, 1750, 1768.
* I'lace MSS. .'7790 — 10 ; see The Life of Francis Place, l77X-i9^4, by
Professor C.rahani Wallas, 1898 ; second edition. 1918. There is evidence
of very similar or^aaisation in other towns. At Birmingham, for instance,
there w;is a s\>.t<ni.iti. " ' '' \ '::!■ i. 1 ; ! .1 ' of
\v.ii.;es, uliich l.istiil t .nn
Ltje,\^\' J J.-), ell i ■, :<y i- . \\ . v..iliuu, !;"»>>;.
The Clothiers 33
Here the rise of a class of lifelong wage-earners took a form
altogether different from that in the London tailoring trade,
but it produced the same result of combinations among the
workers. The " wealthy clothiers " of Som.erset, Glouces-
tershire, and Devon, who during the sixteenth century had
" mightily increased in fame and riches, their houses fre-
quented Hke kings' courts," ^ provided and owned the
material of the industry throughout the whole manufacturing
process, but employed a separate class of operatives at each
stage. Buying the wool at one of the market towns, the
capitaUst clothier gave this to one set of hand-workers to
be carded and spun into yarn in the v-illage households.
The yam was passed on to another set — the hand-loom
weavers — to be made into cloth in their cottages. The
cloth was then " fulled " at the capitalist's own mill (usually
a water-mill) and again given out to be " dressed " by a
new set of hand-workers, after which it was ready to be
packed in the warehouse, and dispatched to Bristol or
London for shipment or sale. In this case, as in that of
the tailors, the operatives still retained the ownership of
the tools of their particular processes, but it was practically
impossible for them to acquire either the capital or the
commercial knowledge necessary for the success of so highly
organised an industry, and we accordingly find them enter-
ing into extensive combinations from the closing years
of the seventeenth century. Already in 1675 the journey-
men clothworkers of London combined to petition the Court
of the Clothworkers' Company against the engagement of
workmen from the country. In 1682 we hear of them
taking advantage of an extensive shipping order to refuse,
^ A Declaration of the Estate of Clothing now used within this Realnie of
England, by John May, Deputy Alnager (1613, 51 pp., in B.M. 712, g. 16), a
volume which contains many interesting pamphlets on the woollen manu-
facture between 1613 and 1753. Already in 1622, a year of depression of
trade, we hear of numerous riots and tumults among the weavers of the
West of England, notably those of certain Devonshire towns, who paraded
the streets demanding work or food {Quarter Sessions from Elizabeth to
Anne, by A. H. A. Hamilton, 1878, pp. 95-6). But there is as yet no
evidence of durable combinations at so early a date.
C
34 The Origins of Trade Unionism
in concert, to work under 12s. per week. But it is not
clear whether any lasting association then resulted.^ In the
West of England the ephemeral revolts of the early part of
the seventeenth century seem to have developed into lasting
combinations by the end of that century. We hear of
them at Tiverton as early as 1700.2 In 1717 the Journals
of the House of Commons contain evidence of the existence
of a widespread combination of the woollen-workers in
Devonshire and Somerset. The Mayor and Corporation of
Bradninch complain " that for some years past the wool-
combers and weavers in those parts have been confederat-
ing how to incorporate themselves into a club : and ha\
to the number of some thousands in this county, in a vei
riotous and tumultuous manner, exacted tribute from
many." ^ The House of Commons apparently thought tli
evil could be met by Royal Authority and requested ti
King toHssue a Proclamation. Accordingly on February 4,
1718, a Royal Proclamation was issued against these " law-
less clubs and societies which had illegally presumed to u--
a common seal, and to act as Bodies Corporate, by makii
and unlawfully conspiring to execute certain By-laws >
Orders, whereby they pretend to determine who had a rigl
to the Trade, what and how many Apprentices and Joumcx
men each man should keep at once, together with the pri< ■
of all their manufactures, and the manner and materials >
which they should be wrought." "* This kingly fulmination ,
which was read at the Royal Exchange, failed to effect i;
purpose, for the Journals of the House of Commons h
1723 and 1725 contain frequent complaints of the con-
tinuance of the combinations,* which are constantly heard
"^ ' MS.Minutes, Court Book of the Cloth workers' Companj', December 10,
1675 ; August 16, 1682 ; Industrial Organisation of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904, p. igg.
* History of Tiverton, by Martin Dunsford (Exeter, 1790).
^ House of Commons Journals, vol. xviii. p. 715, February 5, 171 7.
Tiverton and Exeter petition to the same eflect.
* Hughson's London, p. 337. Tlie proclamation was reprinted in Notes
andQueries, September 21,1 867, from a copy preserved by the Sun Eire Office.
* See the petitions from Exeter and Dartmouth, February 24, 1723,
The Domestic System 35
of throughout the whole of the eighteenth century, d}ang
away only on the supersession of the male by the female
weaver at the beginning of the nineteenth century> not to
be effectively revived until the beginning of the twentieth.
This early development of trade combinations in the
West of England stands in striking contrast with their
absence in the same industry where pursued, as in York-
shire, on the so-called " Domestic Sj^stem." The Yorkshire
weaver was a small master craftsman of the old type, him-
self bupng and owning the raw material, and once or twice
a week selling his cloth in the markets of Leeds or Wakefield,
to which, we are told by Defoe in 1724, " few clothiers
bring more than one piece." " Almost at every house,"
he writes of the country near Halifax, " there was a Tenter,
and almost on every Tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey,
or shalloon, ... at every considerable house was a manu-
factory ; . . . then, as every clothier must keep a horse,
perhaps two, to fetch and carry for the use of his manu-
facture, viz., to fetch home his wool and his provisions from
the market, to carry his yam to the spinners, his manu-
facture to the fuUing mill, and when finished, to 'the
market to be sold, and the like ; so every manufacturer
generally keeps a cow or two or more, for his family, and
this employs the two or three or four pieces of enclosed
land about his house, for they scarce sow com enough for
their cocks and hens." ^ Not until the Yorkshire cloth
vol. XX. pp. 268-9 ; and those from Taunton, Tiverton, Exeter, and Bristol,
March 3 and 7, 1725, vol. xx. pp. 598, 602, 648. In 1729 the Bristol
weavers, " while the corporation was at church," riotously attacked the
house of an obnoxious employer, and had to be repulsed by the troops
{History of Bristol, p. 261, by J. Evans ; Bristol, 1824). In 173 8 they forced
the clothiers to sign a bond that they would " for ever forward " give
fifteen pence a yard for wea\'ing, under penalty of ^1000 {Gentlemen' s
Magazine, 1738, p. 658 ; see also " An Essay on Riots, their Causes and
Cure," pubhshed in the Gloucester Journal, and reprinted in the GeM//ewe«'s
Magazine, 1739, pp. 7-10). In 1756 there was an extensive and serious
uprising (see A State of the Case and Narrative of Facts relating to the late
Commotion and Rising of the Weavers in the County of Gloucester, in the
Gough Collection, Bodleian Library).
* Defoe's Tour, vol. iii. pp. 97-101, 116 (1724). Johii Bright mentions
36 The Origins of Trade Unionism
dealers began, about 1794, to establish factories on a large
scale do we find any Trade Unions, and then journeymen
and small masters struggled with one accord to resist the
new form of capitalist industry which was beginning to
deprive them of their control over the product of their
labour.
The worsted industry appears everywhere to have been
carried on rather like the woollen manufactures of the
West of England than the same industry in Yorkshire.
The woolcomber frequently owned the inexpensive hand-
combs and pots with which he worked. But the wool-
combers, like the weavers of the West of England, formed
but one of several classes of workers for whose employ-
ment both capital and commercial knowledge was indis-
pensable. We hear, already in 1674, of an attempt by the
Leicester woolcombers to " form a company," ^ though
with what success we know not. In 1741 it was remarked
that the woolcombers had " for a number of years past
erected themselves into a sort of corporation (though
without a charter) ; their first pretence was to take care
of their poor brethren that should fall sick, or be out of
work ; and this was done by meeting once or twice a week,
and each of them contributing 2d. or 3d. towards the box
to make a bank, and when they became a little formidable
they gave laws to their masters, as also to themselves — ■
viz., That no man should comb wool under 2s. per dozen ;
that no master should employ any comber that was not of
their club : if he did they agreed one and all not to work
for him ; and if he had employed twenty they all of them
turned out, and oftentimes were not satisfied with that,
but would abuse the honest man that would labour, and in
his father's apprenticeship, about 1789, to " a most worthy man who had
a few acres of ground, a very small farm, and three or four looms in his
house" (speech reported in Beehive, February 2, 1867). For a less
optimistic account of the Yorkshire clothiers, who were, even in the seven-
teenth century, often mere wage-earners, see Cartwright's Chapters oj
Yorkshire History.
* History of Leicester, by James Thompson, 1849, pp. 431-2.
Woolcombers' Clubs 37
a riotous manner beat him, break his comb-pots, and
destroy his working tools ; the}^ further support one another
in so much that they are become one society throughout
the kingdom. And that they may keep up their price to
encourage idleness rather than labour, if any one of their
club is out of work, they give him a ticket and money to
seek for work at the next town where a box club is, where
he is also subsisted, suffered to hve a certain tinle with them,
and then used as before ; by which means he can travel
the kingdom round, be caressed at each club, and not spend
a farthing of his own or strike one stroke of work. This
hath been imitated by the weavers also, though not carried
through the kingdom, but confined to the places where
they work." ^ The sur\'iving members of the Old Amicable
Society of Woolstaplers retain a tradition of local trade
clubs dating from the very beginning of the eighteenth
century, and of their forming a federal union in 1785. Old
members of the United Joumejonen Curriers' Society have
seen circulars and tramping cards, showing that a similar
tramping federation existed in their trade from the middle
of the century. 2
In other cases the expensive nature of the raw material
or the tools aided the creation of a separate class. The
Spitalfields silk-weavers, whom we find forming a permanent
organisation in 1773, could never have owTied the costly
silks they wove.^ The gold-beaters, whose union dates
at any rate from 1777, were similarly debarred from owning
the material.
^ A Short Essay upon Trade in General, by " A Lover of his Country,"
1741, quoted in James' History of the Worsted Manufacture in England,
p. 232.
2 See, in corroboration, Leicester Herald, August 24, 1793 ; Morning
Chronicle, October 13, 1824 ; Place MSS., 27801 — 246, 247.
^ The Dublin silk-weavers, owdng perhaps to their having been largely
Huguenot refugees in a Roman Catholic town, appear to have been associ-
ated from the early part of the eighteenth century ; see, for instance. The
Case of the Silk and Worsted Weavers in a Letter to a Member of Parliament
(DubUn, 1749, 8 pp.). Compare A Short Historical Account of the Silk
Manufacture in England, by Samuel Sholl, 1811, and Industrial Dublin
since i6g8 and the Silk Industry in Dublin, by J. J. Webb, 1913.
38 The Origins of Trade Unionism
Another remarkable instance of combination prior to
the introduction of mechanical power and the factory
system is that of the " stockingers," the hosiery workers,
or framework knitters, described by Dr. Brentano. From
the very beginning of the use of the stocking-frame, in the
early part of the seventeenth century, servants appear to
have been set to work upon frames owned by capitahsts,
though the bulk of the trade was in the hands of men who
worked upon their own frames as independent producers.
The competition of these embryo factories was severely
felt by the domestic framework knitter, and on the final
breakdown, in 1753, of the legal limitation of apprentices,
it became disastrous. There grew up a " ruinous practice
of parishes giving premiums to manufacturers for employing
their poor," and this flooding of the labour market with
subsidised child labour reduced the typical framework
knitter to a state of destitution. Though he continued to
work in his cottage, he rapidly lost the ownership of his
frame, and a system arose under which the frames were,
hired at a rent, either from a small capitahst frame-owner,
or from the manufacturer by whom the work was given
out. The operative was thus deprived, not only of the
ownership of the product, but also of the instruments of his
labour. Hence, although from the very beginning of the
eighteenth century there were ephemeral combinations
among the framework knitters, in which masters and men
often joined, it was not until 1780, when the renting of
frames had become general, that a durable Trade Union
of wage-earners arose. ^
The development of the ipdustrial organisation of the
^ The condition of the framework knitters may be gathered from the
elaborate Parhamentary Inquiry, the proceedings of which fill fifteen
pages of the Journals of the House of Commons, vol. xxvi., April 19, 1753.
See also vols, xxxvi. and xxxvii., and the Report from the Committee on
Framework Knitters' Petitions, 1812 ; and Conflicts of Capital and Labour,
by G. Howell, 1890. Felkin's History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and
Lace Manufactures, 1867, contains an exhaustive account of the trade,
founded on Gravener Henson's History of the Framework Knitters. 1831,
now a scarce work, of which only one volume was published.
The Shipwrights 39
cutlery trades affords another example of this evolution.
At the date of the establishment in Sheffield of the Cutlers'
Company (1624) the typical craftsman was himself the owner
of his " wheel " and other instruments, and a strict limitation
of apprentices was maintained. By 1791, when the masters
obtained from ParUament a formal ratification of the pre-
valent relaxation in the customary restrictions as to appren-
tices, we find this system largely replaced by something
very Hke the present order of things, in which the typical
Sheffield operative works with material given out by the
manufacturer, upon wheels rented either from the latter or
from a landlord suppljdng power. It is no mere coincidence
that in the year 1790 the Sheffield employers found them-
selves obliged to take concerted action against the " scissor-
grinders and other workmen who have entered into un-
lawful combinations to raise the price of labour." ^
The shipwrights of Liverpool, and probably those of
other shipbuilding ports, were combined in trade benefit
clubs early in the eighteenth century. At Liverpool,
where this society had very successfully maintained the
customary limitation of apprentices, the members were
all freemen of the municipal corporation, and as such
entitled to the ParHamentary franchise. As a result the
shipwrights' organisation became intensely poHtical, by
which was meant chiefly the negotiation of the sale of its
members' votes. At the election of 1790, when WTiigs
and Tories compromised in order to avoid the expense of
a contest, it was the Shipwrights' Society, then at the zenith
of its power, which insisted on forcing a contest by nominat-
ing its own candidate, and, in- the end, actually put him
at the head of the poll. The society, which had a contribu-
tion in 1824 of fifteen pence per month, and had built alms-
houses for its old members, is reputed to have been at one
^ Sheffield Iris, August 7 and September g, 1790. The Scissorsmiths'
Friendly Society, cited by Dr. Brentano, was established in April 1791.
Other trade friendly societies in Shef&eld appear to date from a much
earher period.
40 TJie Origins of Trade Unionism
time so powerful that any employer who refused to obey
its rules found his business absolutely brought to a stand-
stiU.i
But the cardinal example of the conception of Trade
Unionism with the divorce of the worker from the instru-
ments of production is seen in the rapid rise of trade com-
binations on the introduction of the factory system. We
have already noticed that Trade Unions in Yorkshire began
with the erection of factories and the use of power. When,
in 1794, the clothiers of the West Riding failed to prevent
the Leeds merchants from establishing large factories,
" wherein it is intended to employ a great number of persons
now working at their own homes," the journeymen took
the matter into their own hands, and founded " the Clothiers'
Community," or " Brief Institution," professedly to gather
" briefs " or levies for the relief of the sick, and to carry on
a Parliamentary agitation for hampering the factory owners
by a legal Hmitation of apprentices. " It appears," reports
the Parliamentary Committee of 1806, " that there has
existed for some time an institution or society among the
woollen manufacturers, consisting chiefly of clothworkers.
In each of the principal manufacturing towns there appears
to be a society, composed of deputies chosen from the
several shops of workmen, from each of which town societies
one or more deputies are chosen to fonn what is called the
central committee, which meets, as occasion requires, at
some place suitable to the local convenience of all parties.
The powers of the central committee appear to pei*vade
the whole institution ; and any determination or measure
which it may adopt may be communicated with ease through-
out the whole body of manufacturers. Every workman,
on his becoming a member of the society, receives a certain
card or ticket, on which is an emblematical engraving — the
^ Sir J. A. Picton's Memorials of Liverpool, 1875; A Digest of the
Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery, by George
White, 1824, p. 233; Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Howell,
1890, pp. 8.J-3.
The Cotton-spinners 41
same, the Committee are assured, both in the North and
the West of England — that by producing his ticket he may
at once show he belongs to the society. The same rules
and regulations appear to be in force throughout the whole
district, and there is the utmost reason to believe that no
clothworker would be suffered to carry on his trade, other-
wise than in soHtude, who should refuse to submit to the
obligations and rules of the society." ^ The transformation
of cotton-spinning into a factory industry, which may be
said to have taken place round about the year 1780, was
equally accompanied by the growth of Trade Unionism.
The so-called benefit clubs of the Oldham operatives, which
we know to have existed from 1792, and those of Stockport,
of which we hear in 1796, were the forerunners of that
network of spinners' societies throughout the northern
counties and Scotland which rose into notoriety in the
great strikes of the next thirty years. ^
It is easy to understand how the massing together in
factories of regiments of men all engaged in the same trade
facilitated and promoted the formation of journeymen's
trade societies. But with the cotton-spinners, as with the
tailors, the rise of permanent ti'ade combinations is to be
ascribed, in a final analysis, to the definite separation
between the functions of the capitalist entrepreneur and the
manual worker — between, that is to say, the direction of
industrial operations and their execution. It has, indeed,
become a commonplace of modern Trade Unionism that
only, in those industries in which the worker has ceased to
be concerned in the profits of buying and selling — that
inseparable characteristic of the ownership and management
of the means of production — can effective and stable trade
organisations be established.
The positive proofs of this historical dependence of
Trade Unionism upon the divorce of the worker from the
^ Report of Committee on the Woollen Manufacture, 1806, p. 16 ; see also
Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Hpwell, 1890.
^ See Chapter III.
C 2
42 The Origins of Trade Unionism
ownership of the means of production are complemented
by the absence of any permanent trade combinations in
industries in which the divorce had not taken place. The
degradation of the Standard of Life of the skilled manual
worker on the break-up of the mediaeval system occurred
in all sorts of trades, whether the operative retained his
ownership of the means of production or not, but Trade
Unionism followed only where the change took the form
of a divorce between capital and labour. The Corporation
of Pinmakers of London are found petitioning Parliament
towards the end of the seventeenth century or beginning of
the eighteenth, as follows :
" This company consists for the most part of poor and
indigent people, who have neither credit nor mony to pur-
chase wyre of the merchant at the best hand, but are forced
for want thereof to buy only small parcels of the second
or third buyer as they have occasion to use it, and to sell
off the pins they make of the same from week to week,
as soon as they are made, for ready money to feed them-
selves, their wives and children, whom they are constrained
to imploy to go up and down every Saturday night from
shop to shop to offer their pins to sale, otherwise cannot
have money to buy bread. And these are daily so exceed-
ingly multiplyed and encreased by reason of the unlimited
number of apprentices that some few covetous-minded
member's of the company (who have considerable stocks)
do constantly imploy and keep. . . . The persons that
buy the pins from the maker to sell again to other retgiling
shopkeepers, taking advantage' of this necessity of the
poor workmen (who are always forced to sell for ready
mony, or otherwise cannot subsist), have by degrees so
beaten down the price of pins that the workman is not able
to live of his work, . . . and betake themselves to be
porters, tankard bearers, and other day labourers, . . . and
many of their children do daily become parish charges." ^
^ In volume entitled Tracts Relating to Trade, in British Museum, 8i6,
m. 13. Tankard-bearers were water carriers.
The Glovers 43
And the glovers complain at the same period that " they
are generally so poor that they are supphed with leather
upon credit, not being able to pay for that or their work-
folk's wages till they have sold the gloves." ^
Now, although these pinmakers and glovers, and other
trades in hke condition, fully recognised the need for some
protection of their Standard of Life, we do not find any
trace of Trade Unionism among them. Selling as they
did, not their labour alone, but also its product, their only
resource was legislative protection of the price of their
wares. ^ In short, in those industries in which the cleavage
between capitahst and artisan, manager and manual
labourer, was not yet complete, the old gild poUcy of com-
mercial monopoly was resorted to as the only expedient for
protecting the Standard of Life of the producer.
We do not contend that the divorce supphes, in itself,
a complete explanation of the origin of Trade Unions.
At all times in the history of English industry there
have existed large classes of workers as much debarred
from becoming the directors of their own industry as the
eighteenth-century tailor or woolcomber, or as the modem
cotton-spinner or miner. Besides the semi-servile workers
on the land or in the mines, it is certain that there were in
the towns a considerable class of unskilled labourers,
excluded, through lack of apprenticeship, from any participa-
tion in the gild.^ By the eighteenth century, at any rate,
^ Reasons against the designed leather impositions on gloves, B.M. 8i6,
m. 13.
2 We shall have occasion later to refer to the absence of eflFective
Trade Unionism in those trades which are still carried on by small working
masters.
^ The assumption frequently made that the Craft Gilds, at their best
period, included practically the whole working population, appears to us
unfounded. The gild system at no time extended to any but the skilled
handicraftsmen, alongside of whom must always have worked a large
number of unapprenticed labourers, who received less than half the wages
of the craftsmen. We venture to suggest that it is doubtful whether the
Craft Gilds at any time numbered as large a proportion of the working
population as the Trade Unions of the present day. See Industrial
Democracy, p. 480,
44 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the numbers of this class must have been largely swollen,
by the increased demand for common labour involved in
the growth of the transport trade, the extensive building
operations, etc. But it is not among the farm servants,
miners, or general labourers, ill-paid and ill-treated as
these often were, that the early Trade Unions arose. W^e
do not even hear of ephemeral combinations among them,
and only very occasionally of transient strikes.^ The
formation of independent associations to resist the will of
employers requires the possession of a certain degree of
personal independence and strength of character. Thus
we find the earhest Trade Unions arising among journeymen
whose skill and Standard of Life had been for centuries
encouraged and protected by legal or customary regulations
as to apprenticeship, and by the limitation of their numbers
which the high premiums and other conditions must have
involved. It is often assumed that Trade Unionism arose
as a protest against intolerable industrial oppression. This
was not so. The first half of the eighteenth century was
certainly not a period of exceptional distress. For fifty
years from 1710 there was an almost constant succession
of good harvests, the price of wheat remaining unusually
low. The tailors of London and Westminster united, at
the very beginning of the eighteenth century, not to resist
any reduction of their customary earnings, but to wring
from their employers better wages and shorter hours of
labour. The few survivors of the hand woolcombers still
cherish the tradition of the eighteenth century, when they
styled themselves " gentlemen woolcombers," refused to
^ " Tumults," or strikes, among the coal-miners are occasionally men-
tioned durinj» the eighteenth century, but no lasting combinations. See,
for those in Somerset, Carmarthenshire, etc., in 1757, Gentlemen' s Magazine,
1757, pp. 90, 185, 285, etc. In 1765 there was a prolonged strike against
the " yearly bond " by the Darham miners {Calendar of Home Office Papers,
1763 ; Sykes' Local Records, vol. i, p. 254). The Keelmen, who loaded
coals on the Tyne, "mutinied" in 1654 and 1671 "for the increase of
wages" ; and there were fierce strikes in 1710, 1744, 1750, I77i,and 1794.
We have, however, no particulars as to their associations, which were
probably ephemeral (Sykes' Local Records ; Richardson's Local Historian' s
Table Book ; C>cntlemen's Magazine, 1750).
Trade Clubs 45
drink with other operatives, and were strong enough, as
we have seen, to give " laws to their masters." ^ The very
superior millwrights, whose exclusive trade clubs preceded
any general organisation of the engineering trade, had for
" their everyday garb " a. " long frock coat and tall hat." ^
And the curriers, hatters, woolstaplers, shipwrights, brush-
makers, basketmakers, and calico-printers, who furnish
prominent instances of eighteenth-century Trade Unionism,
all earned relatively high wages, and long maintained a very
effectual resistance to the encroachments of their employers.
It appears to us from these facts that Trade Unionism
would have been a feature of Enghsh industry, even with-
out the steam-engine and the factory system. Whether
the association of superior workmen which arose in the
early part of the century would, in such an event, ever
have developed into a Trade Union Movement is another
matter. The typical " trade club " of the town artisan of
this time was an isolated " ring " of highly skilled journey-
men, who were even more decisively marked off from the
mass of the manual workers than from the small class of
capitahst employers. The customary enforcement of the
apprenticeship prescribed by the EHzabethan statutes, and
the high premiums often exacted from parents not belonging
to the trade, long maintained a virtual monopoly of the
better-paid handicrafts in the hands of an almost hereditary
caste of " tradesmen " in whose ranks the employers them-
selves had for the most part served their apprenticeship.
Enjoying, as they did, this legal or customary protection,
they found their trade clubs of use mainly for the provision
of friendly benefits, and for " higgling " with their masters
for better terms. We find little trace among such trade
clubs of that sense of solidarity between the manual workers
^ Many instances of insolence and aggression by the woolcombers are
on record ; the employers' advertisements in the Nottingham Journal,
August 31, 1795, and the Leicester Herald of June 1792, are only two out
of many similar recitals.
^ Jubilee Souvenir History oj the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
1901, p. 12.
46 The Origins of Trade Unionism
of different trades which afterwards became so marked a
feature of the Trade Union Movement. Their occasional
disputes with their employers resembled rather family
differences than conflicts between distinct social classes.
They exhibit more tendency to " stand in " with their
masters against the community, or to back them against
rivals or interlopers, than to join their fellow-workers of
other trades in an attack upon the capitalist class. In short,
we have industrial society still divided vertically trade by
trade, instead of horizontally between employers and wage-
earners. This latter cleavage it is which has transformed
the Trade Unionism of petty groups of skilled workmen
into the modern Trade Union Movement.^
The pioneers of the Trade Union Movement were not
the trade clubs of the town artisans, but the extensive
combinations of the West of England woollen-workers
and the Midland framework knitters. It was these associa-
tions that initiated what afterwards became the common
purpose of nearly all eighteenth-century combinations — the
appeal to the Government and the House of Commons to
save the wage-earners from the new poUcy of buying labour,
like the raw material of manufacture, in the cheapest
1 That such clubs were common in the handicraft trades in London as
early as 1720 appears from the following extract from The Case of the Master
Taylors residing within the Cities of London and Westminster, a petition
which led to the Act of 1720: "This combination of the Journeymen
Taylors ... is of very ill example to Journeymen in all other trades ; as
is sufificiently seen in the Journeymen Curriers, Smiths, Farriers, Sail-
makers, Coachmakers, and artificers of divers other arts and mysteries,
who have actually entered into Confederacies of the like nature ; and the
Journeymen Carpenters, Bricklayers, and Joyners have taken some steps
for that purpose, and only wait to see the event of others." And the
Journeymen Tailors in their petition of I7.}5 allude to the large number of
"Montlily Clubs" among the London handicraftsmen. With regard to
the curriers at this date, see Place MSS, 27801 — 246, 247.
It may be conveniently noticed here that, although strikes are, as we
have seen, as old as the fourteenth century at least, the word " strike " w^as
not commonly used in this sense until the latter part of the eighteenth
century. The Oxford Dictionary gives the first instance of its use as in
1768, when the Annual Register refers to the hatters having "struck " for
a rise in wages. The derivation appears to be from the sailors' term of
" striking " the mast, thus bringing the movement to a stop.
The Industrial Revolution 47
market. The rapidly changing processes and widening
markets of EngUsh industry seemed to demand the sweeping
away of all. restrictions on the supply and employment of
labour, a process which involved the levelling of all classes
of wage-earners to their " natural wages." The first to
feel the encroachment on their customary earnings were
the woollen- workers employed by the capitahst clothiers
of the Western counties. As the century advances we find
trade after trade taking up the agitation against the new
conditions, and such old-estabhshed clubs as the hatters and
the woolcombers joining the general movement as soon as
their own industries are menaced. To the skilled craftsman
in the towns the new poHcy was brought home by the
repeal of the regulations which protected his trade against
an influx of pauper labour. His defence was to ask for the
enforcement of the law relating to apprenticeship. ^ This
would not have helped the operative in the staple textile
industries. To him the new order took the form of
constantly declining piecework rates. What he demanded,
therefore, was the fixing of the " convenient proportion of
wages " contemplated by Ehzabethan legislation. But,
whether craftsmen or factory operatives, the wage-earners
turned, for the maintenance of their Standard of Life, to
that protection by the law upon which they had been
taught to rely. So long as each section of workers beheved
in the intention of the governing class to protect their trade
from the results of unrestricted competition no community
of interest arose. It was a change of industrial pohcy on
the part of the Government that brought all trades into
line, and for the first time produced what can properly be
called a Trade Union Movement. In order, therefore, to
make this movement fully intelUgible, we must now retrace
our steps, and follow the pohtical history of industry in
the eighteenth century.
1 So much is this the case that Dr. Brentano asserts that " Trade
Unions originated with the non-observance of " the Elizabethan Statute '
of Apprentices (p. 104), and that their primary object was, in all cases, the
enforcement of the law on the subject.
48 The Origins of Trade Unionism
The dominant industrial policy of the sixteenth century
was the establishment of some regulating authority to
perform, for the trade of the time, the services formerly
rendered by the Craft Gilds. When, for instance, in the
middle of the century the weavers found their customary
earnings dwindling, they managed so far to combine as to
make their voice heard at Westminster. In 1555 we find
them complaining " that the rich and wealthy clothiers
do many ways oppress them " by putting unapprenticed
men to work on the capitahsts' own looms, by letting out
looms at rents, and " some also by giving much less wages
and hire for the weaving and workmanship of clothes than
in times past they did." ^ To the Parhament of these days
it seemed right and natural that the oppressed wage-earners
should turn to the legislature to protect them against the
cutting down of their earnings by the competing capitalists.
The statutes of 1552 and 1555 forbid the use of the gig-mill,
restrict the number of looms that one person may own to
two in towns and one in the country, and absolutely pro-
hibit the letting-out of looms for hire or rent. In 1563,
indeed, Parhament expressly charged itself with securing
to all wage-earners a " convenient " Uvehhood. The old
laws fixing a maximum wage could not, in face of the
enormous rise of prices, be put in force " without the great
grief and burden of the poor labourer and hired man,"
Circumstances were changing too fast for any rigid rule.
But by the celebrated " Statute of Apprentices " the
statesmen of the time contrived arrangements which would,
as they hoped, " yield unto the hired person, both in the
time of scarcity and in the time of plenty, a convenient
])roportion of wages." Every year the justices of each
locality were to meet, " and calUng unto them such discreet
and grave persons ... as they shall think meet, and
conferring together respecting the plenty or scarcity of the
^ Preamblf^ to " An Act touching Weavers " (2 and 3 Philip and Mary.
t. xi.) ; sec I'roude's History of England, vol. i. pp. 57-9; and W. C.
Taylor's Modern factory System, pp. 53-5.
The Act of Elizabeth 49
time," were to fix the wages of practically every kind of
labour,^ their decisions being enforceable by heavy penalties.
Stringent regulations as to the necessity of apprenticeship,
the length of its term, and the number of apprentices to be
taken by each employer, received the confirmation of law.
The typical ordinances of the mediaeval gild were, in fact,
enacted in minute detail in a comprehensive general statute
appl^dng to the greater part of the industry of the period.
We need not discuss the very debatable question whether
this celebrated law was or was not advantageous to the
labouring folk of the time, or whether and to what extent
its provisions were actually put in force. ^ But codifying
and enacting as it did the fundamental principles of the
mediaeval social order, we can scarcely be surprised that its
adoption by Parhament confirmed the working man in the
once universal behef in the essential justice and good poHcy
securing by appropriate legislation " the getting of a com-
petent Uvehhood " by all those concerned in industry.^
Exactly the same view prevailed at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. We again find the newly estabhshed
associations of the operatives appeahng to the King, to the
House of Commons, or to Quarter Sessions against the
beating down of their wages by their employers. For the
first half of the century the governing classes continued to
act on the assumption that the industrious mechanic had a
right to the customary earnings of his trade. Thus in
1726 the weavers of Wilts and Somerset combine to petition
* As expanded by i James I. c. 6 and i6 Car. I. c. 4 ; see R. v. Justices
of Kent, 14 East, 395.
2 See on these points. Dr. Cunningham's History of English Industry
and Commerce, Mr. Hewins' English Trade and Finance chiefly in the lyth
Century, and Thorold Rogers' History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. v.
pp. 625-6, etc. Adam Smith obser^'es that the fixing of wages had, in
1776, " gone entirely into disuse " [Wealth of Natio7is, bk. i. ch. x. p. 65),
a statement broadly true, although formal determinations of wages are
found in the MS. Minutes of Quarter Sessions for another half century.
* This forms the constant refrain of the numerous broadsheets or
Tracts relating to Trade of 1688- 1750, which are preserved in the British
Museum, the Guildhall Library, and in the Goldsmith Company's Library
at the University of London.
50 The Origins of Trade Unionism
the King against tlie harshness and fraud of their employers
the clothiers, with the result that a Committee of the Privy
Council investigates their grievances, and draws up " Articles
of Agreement " for the settlement of the matters in dispute,^
admonishing the weavers " for the future " not to attempt
to help themselves by unlawful combinations, but always
" to lay their grievances in a regular way before His Majesty,
who would be always ready to grant them reUef suitable to
the justice of their case." * More often the operatives
appealed to the House of Commons. In 1719 the " broad
and narrow weavers " of Stroud and places round, petitioned
ParUament to put down the tyrannical capitalist clothiers
by enforcing the " Act touching Weavers " of 1355.^ In
1728 the Gloucestershire operatives appealed to the local
justices of the peace, and induced them, in spite of protests
from the master clothiers, and apparently for the first time,
to fix a liberal scale of wages for the weavei's of the country.*
Twenty years later the operatives obtained from ParUament
a special prohibition of truck.^ Finally, in 1756 they
persuaded the House of Commons to pass an Act ^ pro-
viding for the fixing of piecework prices by the justices,
in order that the practice of cutting doNVTi rates and under-
selling might be stopped. " A Table or Scheme for Rates
of Wages " was accordingly settled at Quarter Sessions,
November 6, 1756, with which the operatives were fairly
contented. '^
The next few years saw a revolutionary change in the
industrial policy of the legislature which must have utterly
• Privy Council Miuuti-s of 1726, p. 310 (unpublished) ,* see also
House of Commons Journals, vol. xx. p. 745 (February 20, 1726).
• Privy Council Minutes, February 4, 1726.
• House of Commons Journals, vol. xix. p. 181 (December 5, 1719).
• Petition of " Several weavers of Woollen Broadcloth on behalf '-f
themselves and several tliousands of the Fraternity of Woollen Broadcl
Weavers" (House of CDinimms Tomnals, vol. xxvii. p. 503; si-t- .ilso j ^.,
730-2).
' 22 Geo. II. c. 27
• 20 Geo. II. c. 33.
' Report of Committee on Petitions of West 0/ England Clothiers, House
of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii. pp. 7JOJ.
Laisser-faire 5^
be\\ildered the operatives. Within a generation the House
of Commons exchanged its poUcy of mediaeval protection
for one of " Administrative Nihilism." The Woollen Cloth
Weavers' Act of 1756 had not been one 3^ear in force when
Parhament was assailed by nmnerous petitions and counter
petitions. The employers declared that the rates fixed by
the justices were, in face of the growing competition of
Yorkshire, absolutely impracticable. The operatives, on the
other hand, asked that the Act might be strengthened in
their favour. The clothiers asserted the advantages of free-
dom of contract and unrestrained competition. The weavers
received the support of the landowners and gentry in claim-
ing the maintenance by law of their customary earnings.
The perplexed House of Commons wavered between the
two. At first a Bill was ordered to be drawn strengthening
the existing law ; but ultimately the clothiers were held to
have proved their case.^ The Act of 1756 was, in 1757,
unconditionally repealed ; and Parliament was now heading
straight for laisser-faire.
The struggle over this Woollen Cloth Weavers' Act of
1756 marks the passage from the old ideas to the new.
WTien, in 1776, the weavers, spinners, scribblers, and other
woollen operatives of Somerset petitioned against the evil
that was being done to their accustomed hvelihood by the
introduction of the spinning- jenny into Shepton Mallet, the
House of Commons, which had two centuries before abso-
lutely prohibited the gig-mill, refused even to allow the
petition to be received. ^
The change of pohcy had already affected another trade.
The London Framework Knitters' Company, which had
been incorporated in 1663 for the express purpose of regu-
lating the trade, found itself during the first half of the
eighteenth century in continual conflict with recalcitrant
masters who set its bye-laws at defiance. This long struggle,
in which the journeymen took vigorous action in support of
^ For all these proceedings, see House of Commons Journals, vol. xxvii.
* House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. p. 7 (November i, 1776).
52 The Origins of Trade Uniojiism
the Company, was brought to an end in 1753 by an ex-
haustive Parhamentary inquiry. The bye-laws of the Com-
pany, upon the enforcement of which the journeymen had
rested all their hopes, were solemnly declared to be " in-
jurious and vexatious to the manufacturers," whilst the
Company's authority was pronounced to be " hurtful to the
trade." ^ The total abandonment of all legal regulation of
the trade led, after numerous transitory revolts, to the
estabhshment in 1778 of " The Stocking Makers' Associa-
tion for the Mutual Protection in the Midland Counties of
England," having for its objects the limitation of apprentices,
and the enactment of a fixed rate of wages. Dr. Brentano
has summarised the various attempts made by the operatives
during the next two years to secure the protection of the
legislature, 2 Through the influence of their Union a sym-
pathetic member was returned for the borough of Notting-
ham. Investigation by a committee brought to light a
degree of " sweating " scarcely paralleled even by the worst
modern instances. A Bill for the fixing of wages had actu-
ally passed its second reading when the employers, whipping
up all their friends in the House, defeated it on the third
reading — a rebuff to the workmen which led to serious riots
at Nottingham, and thrust the unfortunate framework
knitters back into despairing poverty.^
By this time the town craftsmen were also beginning to
be menaced by the revolutionary proposals of their em-
ployers. The hatters, for example, whose early combina-
tion we have already mentioned, had hitherto been pro-
tected by the strict limitation of the number of apprentices
prescribed by the Acts of 1566 and 1603, and enforced by
the Feltmakers' Company. We gather from the employers'
complaints that the journeymen's organisation, which by
^ House of Commons Journals, April 13 and 19, 1753, vol. xxvi. pp. 764,
779 ; Felkin's History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufac-
ture, p. 80 ; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce in
Modern Times, 1903, vol. i. p. 663.
* Gilds and Trade Unions, pp. 1 15-21.
' House of Commons Journals, vols, xxxvi. and xxxvii.
The Commons Perplexity 53
this time extended to most of the provincial towns in which
hats were made, was aiming at a strict enforcement of the
law limiting the number of apprentices which each master
might take. This caused the leading master hatters to
promote, in 1777, a Bill to remove the limitation. Against
them was marshalled the whole strength of the journeymen's
organisation. Petitions poured in from London, Burton,
Bristol, Chester, Liverpool, Hexham, Derby, and other
places, the " piecemaster hat or feltmakers and finishers "
usually joining with the journeymen against the demand of
the capitalist employers. The men asserted that, even with
the limitation, " except at brisk times many hundreds are
obliged to go travelling up and down the kingdom in search
of employ." But the House was impressed with the evidence
and arguments of the large employers, and their Bill passed
into law.^
The action of the House of Commons on occasions like
these was not as yet influenced by any conscious theory of
freedom of contract. WTiat happened was that, as each
trade in turn felt the effect of the new capitahst competi-
tion, the journeymen, and often also the smaller employers,
would petition for redress, usually demanding the prohibi-
tion of the new machines, the enforcement of a seven years'
apprenticeship, or the maintenance of the old limitation of
the number of boys to be taught by each employer. The
House would as a rule appoint a Committee to investigate
the complaint, with the full intention of redressing the
alleged grievance. But the large employers would produce
before that Committee an overwhelming array of evidence
proving that without the new machinery the growing export
trade must be arrested ; that the new processes could be
learnt in a few months instead of seven years ; and that
the restriction of the old master-craftsmen to two or three
apprentices apiece was out of the question with the new
buyers of labour on a large scale. Confronted with such a
^ House of Commons Journals, vol. xxxvi. pp. 192, 240, 268, 287, 1777;
Act 17 Geo. III. c. 55, repealing 8 Eliz. c. 11, and i Jac. i.
54 The Origins of Trade Unionism
case as this for the masters even the most sjrmpathetic
committee seldom found it possible to endorse the proposals
of the artisans. In fact, these proposals were impossible.
The artisans had a grievance — perhaps the worst that any
class can have — the degradation of their standard of liveli-
hood by circumstances which enormously increased the pro-
ductivity of their labour. But they mistook the remedy ;
and Parliament, though it saw the mistake, could devise
nothing better. Common sense forced the Government to
take the easy and obvious step of abolishing the mediaeval
regulations which industry had outgrown. But the problem
of protecting the workers' Standard of Life under the new
conditions was neither easy nor obvious, and it remained
unsolved until the nineteenth century discovered the ex-
pedients of Collective Bargaining and Factory Legislation,
developing, in the twentieth century, into the fixing by law
of a Minimum Wage. In the meantime the workers were
left to shift for themselves, the attitude of Parliament to-
wards them being for the first years one of pure perplexity,
quite untouched by the doctrine of freedom- of contract.
That the House of Commons remained innocent of any
general theory against legislative interference long after it
had begun the work of sweeping away the mediaeval regula-
tions is proved by the famous case of the Spitalfields silk-
weavers, in which the old policy of industrial regulation was
reverted to. In 1765 the Spitalfields weavers protested
that they were without employment, owing to the importa-
tion of foreign silk. Assembling in crowds, they marched
in processions to Westminster, headed by bands and banners,
and demanded the prohibition of the import of the foreign
product. Riots occurred sufficiently serious to induce Par-
liament to pass an Act in the terms desired ; ^ but this
experiment in Protection failed to maintain wages, and the
riots were renewed in 1769. Finally Sir John Fielding, the
well-known London police magistrate, suggested to the
^ 5 Geo. III. c. 48 ; see Annual Register, 1765, p. 41 ; Cunningham, Gnnvth
of English Industry and Cominerce in Modern Times, 1903, pp. 519, 796.
The Spitalfields Acts 55
London silkweavers that they should secure their earnings
by an Act.^ Under the pressure of another outbreak of
rioting in 1773, Parliament adopted this proposal, and em-
powered the justices to fix the rates of wages and to enforce
their maintenance. The effect of this enactment upon the
men's combination is significant. " A great man " had told
the weavers, as one of them relates, that the governing class
" made laws, and we, the people, must make legs to them." ^
The ephemeral combination to obtain the Act became
accordingly a permanent union to enforce it. From this
time forth we hear no more of strikes or riots among the
Spitalfields weavers. Instead, we see arising a permanent
machinery, designated the " Union," for the representation,
before the justices, of both masters and men, upon whose
evidence the comphcated lists of piecework rates are period-
ically settled. Clearly the Parhaments which passed the
Spitalfields Acts of 1765 and 1773 had no conception of the
poHtical philosophy of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of
Nations, afterwards to be accepted as the English gospel
of freedom of contract and " natural liberty," was pub-
lished in 1776. At the same time, so exceptional had such
acts become, that when Adam Smith's masterpiece came
into the hands of the statesmen of the time, it must have
seemed not so much a novel view of industrial economics as
the exphcit generaUsation of practical conclusions to which
experience had already repeatedly driven them.
Towards the end of the century the governing classes,
who had found in the new industrial policy a source of
enormous pecuniary profit, eagerly seized on the new
economic theory as an intellectual and moral justification
of that poHcy. The abandonment of the operatives by the
law, previously resorted to under pressure of circumstances,
and, as we gather, not without some remorse, was now
carried out on principle, with unflinching determination.
"^ Act 13 Geo. III. c. 68 ; see A Short Historical Account of the Silk
Manufacttire in England, by Samuel ShoU, 1811
* ibid. p. 4.
56 The Origins of Trade Unionism
When the handloom-weavers, earning little more than a
third of the hvelihood they had gained ten years betore,
and unable to realise that the factory system would be
deliberately allowed to ruin them, made themselves heard
in the House of Commons in 1808, a Committee reported
against their proposal to fix a minimum rate of wages on
the ground that it was " wholly inadmissible in principle,
incapable of being reduced to practice by any means which
can possibly be devised, and, if practicable, would be pro-
ductive of the most fatal consequences " ; and " that the
proposition relative to the limiting the number of apprentices
is also entirely inadmissible, and would, if adopted by the
House, be attended with the greatest injustice to the manu-
facturer as well as to the labourer." ^ Here we have laisser-
faire fully established in Parliament as an authoritative
industrial doctrine of political economy, able to overcome
the great bulk of the evidence given before this Committee,
which was decidedh' in favour of the minimum wage. The
House of Commons had no lack of opportunities for educat-
ing itself on the question. The special misery caused by
bad harvests and the prolonged war between 1793 and
1815 2 brought a rush of appeals, especially from the newly
established associations of cotton operatives. In the early
years of the present century petition after petition poured
in from Lancashire and Glasgow, showing that the rates for
weaving had steadily decHned, and reiterating the old
demands for a legally fixed scale of piecework rates and the
Hmitation of apprentices. In 1795, and again in 1800, and
once more in 1808, Bills fixing a minimum rate were intro-
duced into the House of Commons, sometimes meeting with
considerable favour. The report of the Committee of 1808,
which took voluminous evidence on the subject, has already
been quoted. Petitions from the calico-printers for a legal
* Reports on Petitions oj Cotton Weavers, iSog and iSii.
* " The period between 1795 and 181 5 was characterised by dearths
which on several occasions became well-nigh famines" (Thorold Rogers,
History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. p. 692).
The Appeal to the Law 57
limitation of the number of apprentices, although warmly
supported by the Select Committee to which they were re-
ferred, met ^vith the same fate. Sheridan, indeed, was not
convinced, and brought in a Bill proposing, among other
things, to Umit the number of apprentices. But Sir Robert
Peel (the elder), whose own factories swarmed with boys,
opposed it in the name of industrial freedom, and carried
the House of Commons with him.^
Meanwhile the despairing operatives, baffled in their
attempts to procure fresh legislation, turned for aid to the
existing law. Unrepealed statutes still enabled the justices
in some trades to fix the rate of wages, limited in others
the number of apprentices ; in others, again, prohibited
certain kinds of machinery, and forbade any but apprenticed
men to exercise the trade. So completely had these statutes
fallen into disuse that their very existence was in many
instances unknown to the artisans. The West of England
weavers, however, combined with those of Yorkshire in
1802 to employ an attorney, who took proceedings against
employers for infringing the old laws. The result was that
Parhament hastily passed an Act suspending these statutes,
in order to put a stop to the prosecutions. ^ " At a numerous
meeting of the cordwainers of the City of New Sarum in
1784," says an old circular that we have seen, " it was
unanimously resolved . . . that a subscription be entered
into for putting the law in force against infringements on
the Trade," but apparently without result.^ The Edinburgh
^ Alinutes of Evidence and Report of the Committee on the Petition of the
Journeymen Calico-printers, July 4, 1804, July 17, 1806. See also Sheridan's
speech reported in Hansard's Parhamentary Debates, vol. ix. pp. 534-8.
^ 43 Geo. III. c. 136, continued in successive years until the definite
repeal, in 1809, of most of the laws regulating the woollen manufacture by
49 Geo. III. c. 109 ; see Cunningham, 1903, vol. ii. p. 659.
* It was reprinted in the 121st Quarterly Report of the Amalgamated
Society of Boot and Shoemakers. The proceedings were taken by the
Friendly Society of Cordwainers of England, " instituted the 15th of
November 1784." Particulars of the London Bootmakers' Society, which
was in correspondence wath seventy or eighty provincial societies, are
given in A Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and
Machinery, by George White, 1824, p. 97.
58 The Origins of Trade Unionism
compositors were more successful ; on being refused an
advance of wages, to correspond with the rise in the cost of
Uving, they presented, February 28, 1804, a memorial to
the Court of Session, and obtained the celebrated " Inter-
locutor " of 1805, which fixed a scale of piecework prices
for the Edinburgh printing trade.^ But the chief event of
this campaign for the enforcement of the old laws began in
Glasgow. The cotton-weavers of that city, after four or
five years of Parliamentar}'' agitation for additional legisla-
tion, resorted to the law empowering the justices to fix the
rates of wages. After an unsuccessful attempt to fix a
standard rate by agreement with a committee of employers,
the men's association which now extended throughout the
whole of the cotton-weaving districts in the United King-
dom commenced legal proceedings at the Lanarkshire
Quarter Sessions. The employers in 181 2 disputed the
competence of the magistrates, and appealed to the Court
of Sessions at Edinburgh. The Court held that the magis-
trates were competent to fix a scale of wages, and a table
of piecework rates was accordingly drawn up. The em-
ployers immediately withdrew from the proceedings ; but
the operatives were nevertheless compelled, at great ex-
pense, to produce witnesses to testify to every one of the
numerous rates proposed. After one hundred and thirty
witnesses had been heard, the magistrates at length declared
the rates to be reasonable, but made no actual order en-
forcing them. The employers, with few exceptions, refused
to accept the table, which it had cost the operatives £3000
to obtain. The result was the most extensive strike the
trade has ever known. From Carlisle to Aberdeen every
loom stopped, forty thousand weavers ceasing work almost
simultaneously. After three weeks' strike the employers
^ Processor Foxwell kindly placed at our disposal a unique series of
pamphlets relating to these proceedings, which are now in the Goldsmiths
Company's Library at the University of London, including the Memorials
of the journeymen and the employers, the Report in the Process by Robert
Bell, and the Scale of Prices as settled by the Court. A full account of the
proceedings is given in the Scottish Typographical Circular, June 1858.
" Illegal Men " . 59
were preparing to meet the operatives, when the whole
Strike Committee was suddenly aiTested by the pohce, and
held to bail under the common law for the crime of com-
bination, of which the authorities, in that revolutionary
period, were very jealous on purely pohtical grounds. The
five leaders were sentenced to terms of imprisonment vary-
ing from four to eighteen months ; and this blow broke up
the combination, defeated the strike, and put an end to
the struggles of the operatives against the progressive
degradation of their wages.^
The London artisans, though they were not put down
by prosecution and imprisonment, met with no greater
success than their Glasgow brethren. Between 1810 and
1812 a number of trade societies combined to engage the
services of a soUcitor, who prosecuted masters for employing
" illegal men," that is to say, men who had not by apprentice-
ship gained a right to follow the trade. The original " case "
which the journeymen curriers submitted to counsel in
1810 (fee two guineas), with a view to putting in force the
Statute of Apprentices, was in our possession, together
with the somewhat hesitating opinion of the legal adviser. ^
In a few cases proceedings were even taken against employers
for having set up in trades to which they had not themselves
served their time. Convictions were obtained in some
instances ; but no costs were allowed to the prosecutors,
who were, on the other hand, condemned to pay heavy
costs when they failed. Lord Ellenborough, moreover, held
on appeal that new trades, such as those of engineer and
lockmaker, were not included within the Ehzabethan Act.
In 181 1 certain journeymen millers of Kent petitioned the
justices to fix a rate of wages under the Elizabethan Act.
When the justices refused to hear the petition a writ of
^ See, for these proceedings, the two Reports of the Coinmittee on the
Petitions of the Cotton Weavers, April 12, 1808, and March 29, 1809 ; and
Richmond's evidence before the Committee on Artisans and Machinery,
1824, Second Report, pp. 59-64.
^ It is now in the British Library of Pohtical Science at the London
School of Economics.
6o The Origins of Trade Unionism
mandamus was applied for. Lord Ellenboroiigh granted
the writ to compel them to hear the petition, but said they
were to exercise their own discretion as to whether they
would fix any rate. The justices, on this hint, decUned to
fix the wages. ^ It soon became apparent that legal pro-
ceedings under these obsolete statutes were, in face of the
adverse bias of the courts, as futile as they were costly.
There was nothing for it then but either to abandon the
line of attack or to petition Parliament to make effective
the still unrepealed laws. This they accordingly did, with
the unexpected result that the " pernicious " law empowering
justices to fix wages was in 1813 peremptorily repealed. ^
The law thus swept away was but one section of the
great Elizabethan statute, and its repeal left the other
clauses untouched. A Select Committee had already,
in 1811, reported that " no interference of the legislature
with the freedom of trade, or with the perfect liberty of
every individual to dispose of his time and of his labour
in the way and on the terms which he may judge most
conducive to his own interest, can take place without
violating general principles of the first importance to the
prosperity and happiness of the community ; without i
establishing the most pernicious precedent, or even without
aggravating, after a very short time, the pressure of the
general distress, and imposing obstacles against that distress
being ever rejnoved." The repeal of the wages clauses
of the statute made this emphatic declaration of the new
doctrine law as far as the fixing of wages was concerned ;
but there remained the apprenticeship clauses. Petitions
for the enforcement of these, and their extension to the new
trades, kept pouring in. They were finally referred to a
large and influential committee which included Canning,
Huskisson, Sir Robert Peel, and Sir James Graham among
its members. The witnesses examined were strongly in
' R. f. Justices of Kent, 14 East, 395 ; see F. D. Longe's Inqutty into
the Law of Strikes, i86o, pp. 10, 11.
» 53 Geo. III. c. 40 (1813).
Repeal of the Statute 6i
favour of the retention of the laws, with amendments
bringing them up to date. The chairman (George Rose)
was apparently converted to the ^dew of the operatives
by the evidence. The committee, which had undoubtedly
been appointed to formulate the complete abolition of the
apprenticeship clauses, found itself unable to fulfil its virtual
mandate. Not venturing, in the teeth of the manufacturers
and economists, to recommend the House to comply with
the operatives' demands, it got out of the difficulty by
making no recommendation at all. Hundreds of petitions
in favour of the laws continued to pour in from all parts of
the country, 300,000 signatures being for retention against
2000 for repeal, masters often joining in the journeymen's
prayer. A pubUc meeting of the ' ' Master Manufacturers and
Tradesmen of the Cities of London and Westminster,"
at the Freemasons' Tavern, passed resolutions strongly
supporting the amendment and enforcement of the existing
law. On the other hand, a committee on which the master
engineers Maudsley and Galloway were prominent members,
argued forcibly in favour of freedom and against " the
monstrous and alarming but misguided association," In
1 8 14 Mr. Serjeant Onslow, who had not served on the com-
mittee of the previous session, introduced a Bill to repeal
the whole apprenticeship law. The " Masters and Journey-
men of Westminster " were heard by counsel against this
measure, but the House had made up its mind in favour of
the manufacturers, and by the Act of 54 Geo. HI. c. 96 swept
away the apprenticeship clauses of the statute, and \vith
them practically the last remnant of that legislative pro-
tection of the Standard of Life which survived from the
Middle Ages.^ The triumphant manufacturers presented
Serjeant Onslow with several pieces of plate for his champion-
ship of commercial hberty.^
^ The Spitalfields Acts, relating to the silkweavers, were, however, not
repealed until 1824 ; and the last sections of 5 Ehz. c. 4 were not formally-
repealed until 1875.
2 ^Vhite's Digest of all the laws at present in existence respecting Masters
and Workpeople, 1824, p. 59. Place wrote to Wakefield, Januarj' 2, 1814 :
62 The Origins of Trade Unionism
So thoroughly had the new doctrine by this time driven
out the very recollection of the old ideals from the mind
of the governing class that it was now the operatives who
were regarded as innovators, and we are hardly surprised
to find another committee gravely declaring that " the
right of every man to employ the capital he inherits, or has
acquired, according to his own discretion, without molesta-
tion or obstruction, so long as he docs not infringe on the
rights or property of others, is one of those privileges which
the free and happy constitution of this country has long
accustomed every Briton to consider as his birthright." ^
But it must be added that the governing class was by no
means impartial in the application of its new doctrine.
Mediaeval regulation acted not only in restriction of free
competition in the labour market to the pecuniary loss of
the employers, but also in restriction of free contract to
the loss of the employees, who could only obtain the best
terms for their labour by collective instead of individual
bargaining. Consequently the operatives, if they had
clearly understood the situation, would have been as anxious
" The affair of Serjeant Onslow partly originated with me, but I had no
suspicion it would be taken up and pushed as vngorouslyas it has been and
is likely to be " (Life of Francis Place, by Prof. Graham Wallas, p. 159).
The proceedings in this matter can be best traced in the House of
Commons Journals for 1813 and iSi.^, vols. lx\nii. and Ixix. ; and in
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vols. xxv. and xxvii. The master's
case is given in a pamphlet. The Origin, Object, and Operation of the Appren-
tice Laws, 1814, 26 p])., preserved in the Pamphleteer, vol. iii. The Resolu-
tions of the Master Manufacturers and Tradesmen of the Cities of London and
Westminster on the Statute j Eliz. c. 4, 1814, 4 pp., gives the contrary view
(T3.M. 1882, d. 2). The contemporary argument for freedom is expressed
in An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain, by G. Chalmers,
i8io ; .see Cunningham, 1903, vol. ii. p. 660. The Nottingham Library
possesses a unique copy of the Articles and General Regulations of a Society
for obtaining Parliamentary Relief, and the Encouragement of Mechanics in
the Improvement of Mechanism, printed at Nottingham in 1S13. Tliis
appears to have been a federation of framework knitters' societies, and
possibly others, for Parliamentary action, as well as trade protection ; and
its establishment in 1813 was perhaps connected with the movement for
the revival of the Apprenticeship Laws.
* Report of the Committee on the State of the Woollen Manufacture in
England, July 4, 1806, p. 12.
I
Repression 63
to abolish the laws against combination as to maintain
those fixing wages and limiting apprenticeship ; just as
the capitalists, better inforrried, were no less resolute in
maintaining the anti-combination laws than in repealing
the others. We shall presently see how slow the workers
were to realise this, in spite of the fact that the laws against
combinations of workmen were maintained in force, and
even increased in severity. Strikes, and any organised
resistance to the employers' demands, were put down with
a high hand. The first twenty years of the nineteenth
century witnessed a legal persecution of Trade Unionists as
rebels and revolutionists. This persecution, thwarting the
healthy growth of the Unions, and driving their members
into violence and sedition, but finally leading to the repeal
of the Combination Laws and the birth of the modem Trade
Union Movement, will be the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
[1799-1825]
The traditional history of the Trade Union Movement
represents the period prior to 1824 as one of unmitigated
persecution and continuous repression. Every Union that
can nowadays claim an existence of over a century pos-
sesses a romantic legend of its early years. The midnight
meeting of patriots in the corner of a field, the buried box
of records, the secret oath, the terms of imprisonment of
the leading officials— all these are in the sagas of the older
Unions, and form material out of which, in an age untroubled
by historical criticism, a semi-mythical origin might easilv
have been created. That the legend is not without a basis
of fact, we shall see in tracing the actual effect upon the Trade
Union Movement of the legal prohibitions of combinations
of wage-earners which prevailed throughout the United
Kingdom up to 1824. But we shall find that some com-
binations of journeymen were at all times recognised by the
law, that many others were only spasmodically interfered
with, and that the utmost rigour of the Combination Laws
was not felt until the far-reaching change of policy marked
by the severe Acts of 1799-1800, which applied to all indus-
tries whatsoever. This will lead us naturally to the story
of the repeal of the whole series of Combination Laws in
1824-5, the most impressive event in the early history of
the movement.
64
The Society to enforce the Law 65
There is a clear distinction — at any rate, as regards
England — between the various statutes which forbade com-
bination prior to the end of the eighteenth century, and the
general Combination Acts of 1799-1800. In the numerous
earher Acts recited and repealed in 1824 the prohibition of
combination was in all cases incidental to the regulation of
the industry. It was assumed to be the business of Parlia-
ment and the law courts to regulate the conditions of labour ;
and combinations could, no more than individuals, be per-
mitted to interfere in disputes for which a legal remedy was
provided. The object primarily aimed at by the statutes
was not the prohibition of combinations, but the fixing of
wages, the prevention of embezzlement or damage, the
enforcement of the contract of service or the proper arrange-
ments for apprenticeship. And although combinations to
interfere with these statutory aims were obviously illegal,
and were usually expressly prohibited, it was an incidental
result that combinations formed to promote the objects of
the legislation, however objectionable they might be to
employers, were apparently not regarded as unlawful.^
Thus one of the earliest types of combination among
journeymen — the society to enforce the law — seems always
to have been tacitly accepted as permissible. Although it
is probable that such associations came technically within
the definitions of combination and conspiracy, whether
under the common law or the early statutes, we know of
no case in which they were indicted as illegal. We have
already described, for instance, how, in 1726, the wooUen
weavers of Wiltshire and Somersetshire openly combined
to present a petition to the King in Council against their
masters, the broad clothiers. The Privy Council, far from
deeming the action of the weavers illegal, considered and
dealt with their complaint. And when the employers per-
sisted in disobeying the law, we have seen how, in 1756, the
^ An elaborate account of this legislation will be found in Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902,
pp. 21-42.
D
66 The Struggle for Existence
Fraternity of Woollen Clothweavers petitioned the House
of Commons to make more effectual the power of the justices
to fix wages, and obtained a new Act of Parliament in accord-
ance with their desires. The almost perpetual combinations
of the framework knitters between 1710 and 1800 were
never made the subject of legal proceedings. The com-
binations of the London silkweavers obtained a virtual
sanction by the Spitalfields Acts, under which the delegates
of the workmen's organisations regularly appeared before
the justices, who fixed and revised the piecework prices.
Even in 1808, after the stringency of the law against com-
binations had been greatly increased, the Glasgow and Lan-
cashire cottonweavers were permitted openly to combine for
the purpose of seeking a legal fixing of wages, with the
results already described. Nor was it only the combina-
tion to obtain a legally fixed rate of wages that was left
unmolested by the law. Combinations to put in force the
sections of the Statute of Apprentices (5 Eliz, c. 4), or
other prohibitions of the employment of " illegal workmen,"
occurred at intervals down to 1813. In 1749 a club of
journeymen painters of the City of London proceeded against
a master painter for employing a non-freeman ; and the
proceedings led, in 1750, to a conference of thirty journey-
men and thirty masters with the City Corporation, at which
the regulations were altered. ^ No one seems to have ques-
tioned the legality of the 1811-13 outburst of combinations
to prosecute masters who had not served an apprenticeship,
or who were employing unapprenticed workmen. One
reason, doubtless, for the immunity of combinations to
enforce the law was that they included employers and
sympathisers of all ranks. For instance, the combinations
in 1811-13 to enforce the apprenticeship laws comprised
both masters and journeymen, who were equally aggrieved
* Act of Common Council, November 22, 1750: Hughson's London,
p. 422. There is evidence of at least one other club of painters in London
dating back to the eighteenth century, the " Original Society of Painters
and Glaziers " existing in 1779, which afterwards became the St. Martin's
Society of Painters and Glaziers {Beehive, October 24. 1863).
The Law of Conspiracy 67
by the competition of the new capitahst and his " hire-
lings." 1 The Yorkshire Clothiers' Community, or " Brief
Institution," to which reference has already been made,
included, in some of its ramifications, the " domestic "
master manufacturers, who fought side by side with the
journeymen against the new factory system.
On the other hand, combinations of journeymen to
regulate for themselves their wages and conditions of
employment stood, from the first, on a different footing.
The common law doctrine of the illegaHty of proceedings
" in restraint of trade," as subsequently interpreted by the
judges, of itself made illegal all combinations whatsoever
of journeymen to regulate the conditions of their work.
Moreover, with the regulation by law of wages and the
conditions of employment, any combination to resist the
order of the justices on these matters was obviously of the
nature of rebellion, and was, in fact, put down Uke any
individual disobedience of the law. Nor was express statute
law against combinations wanting. The statute of 1305,
entitled, " Who be Conspirators and who be Champertors "
(33 Edw. I. St. 2), was in 1818 held to apply to a combina-
tion to raise wages among cotton-spinners, whose leaders
were sentenced to two years' imprisonment under this
Act. The " Bill of Conspiracies of Victuallers and Crafts-
men " of 1549 (2 and 3 Edw. VI. c. 15), though aimed
primarily at combinations to keep up the prices charged to
consumers, clearly includes within its prohibitions any com-
binations of journeymen craftsmen to keep up wages or
reduce hours.
It is some proof of the novelty of the workmen's com-
binations in the early part of the eighteenth century, that
neither the employers nor the authorities thought at first
of resorting to the very sufficient powers of the existing law
against them. WTien, in 1720, the master tailors of London
^ This term was used to denote men who had not served a legal appren-
ticeship. See " Rules and Regulations of the Journeymen Weavers,"
reprinted in Appendix No. lo to Report on Combination Laws, 1825.
68 The Struggle for Existence
found themselves confronted with an organised body of
journeymen claiming to make a collective bargain, seriously
"in restraint of trade," they turned, not to the law courts,
but to Parliament for protection,. and obtained, as we have
seen, the Act " for regulating the Journeymen Tailors within
the bills of mortahty " (7 Geo. I. st. i, c. 13, amended by
8 Geo. III. c. 17).^ Similarly, when the clothiers of the
West of England began between 17 17 and 1725 to be in-
convenienced by the " riotous and tumultuous clubs and
societies " of woolcombers and weavers, who made bye-laws
and maintained a Standard Rate,^ they did not put in force
the existing law, but successfully petitioned Parliament for
the Act " to prevent unlawful combinations of workmen
employed in the Woollen Manufactures " (12 Geo. I. c. 34).
Indeed, prior to the general Acts of 1799 and 1800 against
all combinations of journeymen, Parliament was, from the
beginning of the eighteenth century, perpetually enacting
statutes forbidding combinations in particular trades.^
In the English statutes this prohibition of combination
was, as we have seen, only a secondary feature, incidental
to the main purpose of the law. The case is different with
regard to the early Irish Acts, the terms of which point to
a much sharper cleavage between masters and men, due,
perhaps, to difference of religion and race. The very first
statute against combinations which was passed by the Irish
Parliament, the Act of 1729 (3 Geo. II. c. 14), contained no
provisions protecting the wage-earner, and prohibited com-
^ The case of R. v. the Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge in 1721
(8 Mod. 10) is obscurely reported ; and it is uncertain under what law the
men were convicted. See Wright's Law of Criminal Conspiracies and
Agreements, p. 53.
* See the petitions from Devonshire towns, House of Commons Journals,
1717, vol. xviii. p. 715, which, with others in subsequent years, led to a
Select Committee in 1726 (Journals, vol. xx. p. 648, March 31, 1726).
' See, for instance, the Acts regulating the woollen industry, 12 Geo. I.
c. 34 (1725) ; against embezzlement or fraud by shoemakers, 9 Geo. I.
c. 27 (1729) ; relating to hatters, 22 Geo. II. c. 27 (1749) ; to silkweavers,
17 Geo. III. c. 55 (1777) ; and to papermaking, 36 Geo. III. c. iii (1795).
Whitbread declared in the House of Commons that there were in 1800 no
fewer than forty such statutes.
The Combination Act 69
binations in all trades whatsoever. The Act of 1743 (17
Geo. II. c. 8), called forth by the failure of the previous^
prohibition, equally confined itself to drastic penal measures,
including the punishment of the keepers of the public-houses
which were used for meetings. But in later years the
English practice seems to have been followed ; for the laws
of 1758 (31 Geo. II. c. 17), 1763 (3 Geo. III. 34, sec. 23),
1771 (11 and 12 Geo. III. c. 18, sec. 40, and c. 33), and
1779 (19 and 20 Geo. III. c. 19, c. 24, and c. 36) provide for
the fixing of wages, and contain other regulations of industry,
amongst which the prohibition of combinations comes as a
matter of course.
By the end of the century, at any rate, the common law,
both in England and in Ireland, had been brought to the
aid of the special statutes, and the judges were ruling that
any conspiracy to do an act which they considered unlawful
in a combination, even if not criminal in an individual,
was against the common law. Soon the legislature followed
suit. In 1799 the Act 39 Geo. III. c. 81 expressly penalised
all combinations whatsoever.
The grounds for this drastic measure appear to have
been found in the marked increase of Trade Unionism among
workers of various kinds. The operatives' combinations
were regarded as being in the nature of mutiny against their
employers and masters ; destructive of the ' ' discipline ' ' neces-
sary to the expansion of trade ; and interfering with the
right of the employer to "do what he hked with his own."
The immediate occasion was a petition from London
engineering employers, complaining of an alarming strike
of the millwrights. This led to a Bill suppressing combina-
tion in the engineering trade, which was passed by the House
of Commons, in spite of the protests of Sir Francis Burdett
and Benjamin Hobhouse. The measure was, however,
dropped in the House of Lords in favour of a more compre-
hensive Bill, apphcable to all trades, which' Whitbread had
suggested. Thiswas introduced on June 17, 1799, by William
Pitt himself, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who referred
JO The Struggle for Existence
to the alarming growth of combination, not merely in the
Metropolis but also in the north of England. Subsequent
stages of the Bill were moved l)y George Rose, another
member of the Administration ; and the measure was
hurried through all its stages in both Houses with great
rapidity, receiving the Royal Assent only twenty-four days
after its introduction into the House of Commons. There
was therefore Uttle opportunity for any effective demon-
stration against its provisions, but the Journeymen Cahco-
printers' Society of London petitioned against the measure,
and instructed counsel to put forward their objections.
They represented that, although the Bill professed merely
" to prevent unlawful combinations," it created " new crimes
of so indefinite a nature that no one journeyman or workman
will be safe in holding any conversation with another on
the subject of his trade or employment." Only a few other
petitions were presented, and, though Benjamin Hobhouse
opposed it in the Commons and Lord Holland in the Lords,
the Bill passed unaltered into law.^
But the struggle was not yet over. The employers were
not satisfied with the 1799 Act ; and The Times announced
in January 1800 that " one of the first Acts of the Imperial
Parhament [of the United Kingdom] will be for the preven-
1 A Full and Accurate Report of the Proceedings of the Petitioners, etc.
By One of the Petitioners (London, January 1800, 19 pp.). A rare
pamphlet in the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London. " It
is remarkable," says Mr. Justice Stephen, " that in the parliamentary
history for 1799 and 1800 there is no account of any debate on these Acts,
nor are they referred to in the Annual Register for those years" {History
of the Criminal Law, vol. iii. p. 208). That the measure excited some
interest in the textile districts may be inferred from the publication at
Leeds of a pamphlet entitled an Abstract of an Act to prevent Unlawful
Combinations among Journeymen to raise Wages, etc. (Leeds, 1799), which
is in the Manchester Public Library (P. 1735). Lord Holland's speeches
against it are said to have been reprinted for distribution in Manchester
and Liverpool (Lady Holland's Journal, vol. ii. p. 102).
Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have now traced fairly full accounts of the
proceedings, elucidating the scanty references in the Journals of the House
of Commons and House of Lords for 1799-1800 by quotations from the
Parliamentary Register, the Senator, The Times, London Chronicle, True
Briton, and Morning Post. See The Town Labourer, 191 7, ch. vii. pp.
111-42; also Cunningham, Growth, etc., 1903, pp. 732-7.
The Act of 1800 71
tion of conspiracies among journeymen tradesmen to raise
their wages. All benefit clubs and societies are to be im-
mediately suppressed." ^ On the other hand, the trade
clubs in all parts of the country poured in petitions of
protest ; and the Whig and Tory members for Liverpool,
General Tarleton and Colonel Gascoyne, among whose
constituents were the strongly combined shipwrights, who
were freemen and Parliamentary electors, united to bring
in an amending Bill. This was supported in a series of
brilhant speeches by Sheridan, whose attempts to reduce
to a minimum the mischief of the 1799 Act were strenuously
resisted by Pitt and the Law Officers of the Crown. The
petitions were considered by a Committee, which recom-
mended certain amendments. Two justices were substi-
tuted for one as the tribunal ; no justice engaged in the
same trade as the defendant could act ; the qualifying
words " wilfully and maUciously " were introduced in the
description of the offences. A clause protecting trade
friendly societies was proposed but eventually rejected.
A particularly odious feature of the 1799 Act, under which
defendants were required to give evidence against them-
selves under severe penalties for refusal, was left unaltered.
A series of interesting clauses providing for the reference of
wage disputes to arbitration — copied from the contemporary
Act relating to the cotton trade ^ — aroused great opposition,
as tending " to fix wages " and as involving the recognition
of the Trade Union representative, but they were finally
adopted ; without, so far as we are aware, ever being put
in force. ^
The general Combination Act of 1800 was not merely
the codification of existing laws, or their extension from
^ Times, January 7, 1800; Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and
Labour Leaders, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.
^ 39 and 40 George III. c. 90; see Cunningham, 1903, p. 634.
^ 39 and 40 George III. c. 60 ; see, for all this, The Town Labourer,
iy6o-i832, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 191 7, ch. vii. A case in which
an attempt to put the arbitration clauses in force was baulked by the
employers was mentioned to the Committee on Artisans and ^Machinery,
1824, p. 603.
72 The Struggle for Existence
particular trades to the whole field of industry. It repre-
sented a new and momentous departure. Hitherto the
central or local authority had acted as a court of appeal
on all questions affecting the work and wages of the citizen.
If the master and journeyman failed to agree as to what
constituted a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, the
higgling of the market was peremptorily superseded by the
authoritative determination, presumably on grounds of
social expediency, of the standard of remuneration. Prob-
ably the actual fixing of wages by justices of the peace fell
very rapidly into disuse as regards the majority of industries,
although formal orders are found in the minutes of Quarter
Sessions during the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
and deep traces of the practice long survived in the cus-
tomary rates of hiring. Towards the end of the eighteenth
century, at any rate, free bargaining between the capitalist
and his workmen became practically the sole method of
fixing wages. Then it was that the gross injustice of pro-
hibiting combinations of journeymen became apparent,
" A single master," said Lord Jeffrey, " was at liberty at
any time to turn off the whole of his workmen at once —
100 or 1000 in number — if they would not accept of the
wages he chose to offer. But it was made an offence for
the whole of the workmen to leave that master at once if
he refused to give the wages they chose to require." ^ What
was even more oppressive in practice was the employers'
use of the threat of prosecution to prevent even the begin-
nings of resistance among the workmen to any reduction
of wages or worsening of conditions.
It is true that the law forbade combinations of employers
as well as combinations of journejmien. Even if it had
been impartially carried out, there would still have remained
the inequality due to the fact that, in the new sj^stem of
industry, a single employer was himself equivalent to a
^ Combinations of Workmen : Substance of the Speech of Francis Jeffrey
at the Dinner to Joseph Hume, M.P., at Edinburgh, November i8, 1825
(Edinburgh, 1825).
The Law's Unfairness 73
very numerous combination. But the hand of justice was
not impartial. The " tacit, but constant " combination
of employers to depress wages, to which Adam Smith refers,
could not be reached by the law. Nor was there any
disposition on the part of the magistrates or the judges
to find the masters guilty, even in cases of flagrant or
avowed combination. No one prosecuted the master
cutlers who, in 1814, openly formed the Sheffield Mercantile
and Manufacturing Union, having for its main rule that no
merchant or manufacturer should pay higher prices for
any article of Sheffield make than were current in the pre-
ceding year, with a penalty of £100 for each contravention
of this illegal agreement.^ During the whole epoch of
repression, whilst thousands of journeymen suffered for
the crime of combination, there is no case on record in which
an employer was punished for the same offence.
To the ordinary politician a combination of employers
and a combination of workmen seemed in no way com-
parable. The former was, at most, an industrial misde-
meanour : the latter was in all cases a poHtical crime.
Under the shadow of the French Revolution, the English
governing classes regarded all associations of the common
people with the utmost alarm. In this general terror lest
insubordination should develop into rebelhon were merged
both the capitalist's objection to high wages and the poli-
tician's dishke of Democratic institutions. The Combination
Laws, as Francis Place tells us, " were considered as abso-
lutely necessary to prevent ruinous extortions of workmen,
which, if not thus restrained, would destroy the whole of
the Trade, Manufactures, Commerce, and Agriculture of
the nation. . . . This led to the conclusion that the work-
men were the most unprincipled of mankind. Hence the
continued ill-will, suspicion, and in almost every possible
way the bad conduct of workmen and their employers
towards one another. So thoroughly was this false notion
entertained that whenever men were prosecuted to con-
^ Sheffield Iris, March 23, 1814.
D 2
74 The Struggle for Existence
viction for having combined to regulate their wages or the
hours of working, however heavy the sentence passed on
them was, and however rigorously it was inflicted, not the
slightest feeling of compassion was manifested by anybody
for the unfortunate sufferers. Justice was entirely out of
the question : they could seldom obtain a hearing before
a magistrate, never without impatience or insult ; and
never could they calculate on even an approximation to a
rational conclusion. . . . Could an accurate account be
given of proceedings, of hearings before magistrates, trials
at sessions and in the Court of King's Bench, the gross
injustice, the foul invective, and terrible punishments
inflicted would not, after a few years have passed away, be
credited on any but the best evidence." *
It must not, however, be supposed that every combina-
tion was made the subject of prosecution, or that the Trade
Union leader of the period passed his wholp life in gaol.
Owing to the extremely inefficient organisation of the
English police, and the absence of any public prosecutor,
a combination was usually let alone until some employer
was sufficiently inconvenienced by its operations to be willing
himself to set the law in motion. In many cases we find
employers apparently accepting or conniving at their men's
combinations.^ The master printers in London not only
recognised the very ancient institution of the " chapel,"
but evidently found it convenient, at any rate from 1785
onwards, to receive and consider proposals from the journey-
men as an organised body. In 1804 we even hear of a joint
committee consisting of an equal number of masters and
journeymen, authorised by their respective bodies to frame
regulations for the future payment of labour, and resulting
in the elaborate " scale " of 1805, signed by both masters
and men. 3 The London coopers had a recognised organisa-
^ Place MSS. 27798 — 7. The Act of 1800 was scathingly denounced
by Cobbett in the Political Register, August 30, 1823.
^ This is a constant subject of complaint by other employers.
' Introduction to the London Scale of Prices (in London Society of
Compositors' volume).
Unmolested Unions 75
tion in 1813, in which year a list of prices was agreed upon
by representatives of the masters and men. This list was
revised in 1816 and 1819, without any one thinking of a
prosecution.^ The Trade Union was openly reformed in
182 1 as the Philanthropic Society of Coopers. The London
brushmakers in 1805 had " A List of Prices agreed upon
between the Masters and Journeymen," which is still extant.
The framework knitters, and also the tailors of the various
\'illages in Nottinghamshire, were, from 1794 to 1810, in
the habit of freely meeting together, both masters and men,
" to consider of matters relative to the trade," the conferences
being convened by public advertisement.^ The minute
books of the local Trade Union of the carpenters of Preston
for the years 1807 to 1824 chronicle an apparently uncon-
cealed and unmolested existence, in correspondence with
other carpenters' societies throughout Lancashire. The
accounts contain no items for the expense of defending their
officers against prosecutions, whereas there are several
payments for advertisements and pubhc meetings, and, be
it added, a very large expenditure in beer. And there is a
hvely tradition among the aged block printers of Glasgow
that, in their fathers' time, when their very active Trade
Union exacted a fee of seven guineas from each new appren-
tice, this money was always straightway drunk by the men
of the print-field, the employer taking his seat at the head
of the table, and no work being done by any one until
the fund was exhausted. The caHco-printers' organisation
appears, at the early part of the nineteenth centurj*, to
have been one of the strongest and most complete of the
Unions. In an impressive pamphlet of 18 15 the men are
thus appealed to by the employers : " We have by turns
conceded what we ought all manfully to have resisted,
and you, elated wdth success, have been led on from one
extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become
too intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our
^ House of Commons Return, No. 135, of 1834.
2 Advertisements in Nottingham Journal, 1794-18 10.
76 The Struggle for Existence
apprentices, and oftentimes even the number of our journey-
men. You dismiss certain proportions of our hands, and
will not allow others to come in their stead. You stop all
Surface Machines, and go the length even to destroy the
rollers before our face. You restrict the Cylinder Machine,
and even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. You
refuse, on urgent occasions, to work by candleHght, and
e"*'en compel our apprentices to do the same. You dismiss
our overlookers when they don't suit you ; and force
obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set all
subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of
showing deference and respect to your employers, treat
them with personal insult and contempt." ^ Notwith-
standing all this, no systematic attempt appears to have
been made to put down the calico-printers' combination,
and only one or two isolated prosecutions can be traced.
In Dublin, too, the cabinetmakers in the early part of the
present century were combined in a strong union called
the Samaritan Society, exclusively for trade purposes ;
" but though illegal, the employers do not seem to have
looked upon it with any great aversion ; and when on one
occasion the chief constable had the men attending a meeting
arrested, the employers came forward to bail them. Indeed,
they professed that their object, though primarily to defend
their own interests against the masters, was also to defend
the interests of the masters against unprincipled journey-
men. Many of the masters on receiving the bill, of a
journeyman were in the habit of sending it to the trades'
society committee to be taxed, after which the word Com-
mittee was stamped upon it. One case was mentioned,
when between two and three pounds were knocked off
a bill of about eight pounds by the trade committee." ^
^ Considerations addressed to the Jonrneyvien Calico-Printers by one of
their Masters (Manchester, 181 5) ; see also the Report of House of
Commons Committee on the Case of the Calico-Printers, 1806.
* Evidence before Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, as
summarised in the Report on Trade Societies (i860) of the Social Science
Association : see also .■/ Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on
Artizans and Machinery, by George White, 1824.
Laws not enforced 77
And both in London and Edinburgh the journeymen openly
published, without fear of prosecution, elaborate printed
lists of piecework prices, compiled sometimes by a committee
of the men's Trade Union, sometimes by a joint committee
of employers and employed.^ " The London Cabinet-
makers' Union Book of Prices," of which editions were
pubUshed in 1811 and 1824, was a costly and elaborate
work, with many plates, published " by a Com.mittee of
Masters and Journeymen ... to prevent those litigations
which have too frequently existed in the trade." Various
supplements and " index keys " to this work were pubUshed ;
and other similar lists exist. So lax was the administration
of the law that George White, the energetic clerk to Hume's
Committee, asserted that the Act of 1800 had " been in
general a dead letter upon those artisans upon whom it
was intended to have an effect — namely, the shoemakers,
printers, papermakers, shipbuilders, tailors, etc., who have
had their regular societies and houses of call, as though no
such Act was in existence ; and in fact it would be almost
impossible for many of those trades to be carried on without
such societies, who are in general sick and travelling rehef
societies ; and the roads and parishes would be much pestered
with these traveUing trades, who travel from want of employ-
ment, were it not for their societies who relieve what they
call tramps." ^
But although clubs of journeymen might be allowed to
take, like the London bookbinders^ " a social pint of
porter together," and even, in times of industrial peace, to
provide for their tramps and perform all the functions of a
Trade Union, the employers had always the power of
^ The Edinburgh Book of Prices for Manufacturing Cabinet Work
(Edinburgh, 1805, 126 pp.), " as mutually agreed upon by the Masters
and Journeymen." In 1825 the journeymen prepared a Supplement,
which, after the masters had concurred in it, was pubhshed by the men
(Edinburgh, 1825). Both these are in the Goldsmiths' Library at the
University of London.
* A Few Remarks on the State of the Laws at present in Existence for regu-
lating Masters and Workpeople, 1823 (142 pp.), p. 84. Anonymous, but
evidently by George White and Gravener Henson.
yS The Struggle for Existence
meeting any demands by a prosecution. Even those trades
in which we have discovered evidence of the unmolested
existence of combinations furnish examples of the rigorous
application of the law. In 1819 we read of numerous
prosecutions of cabinetmakers, hatters, ironfounders, and
other journeymen, nominally for leaving their work un-
finished, but really for the crime of combination.^ In
1798 five journeymen printers were indicted at the Old
Bailey for conspiracy. The employers had sent for the
men's leaders to discuss their proposals, when, as it was
complained, " the five defendants came, clothed as delegates,
representing themselves as the head of a Parliament as we
may call it." The men were in fact members of a trade
friendly society of pressmen " held at the Crown, near St.
Dunstan's Church, Fleet Street," which, as the prosecuting
counsel declared, " from its appearance certainly bore no
reproachable mark upon it. It was called a friendly society,
but by means of some wicked men among them this society
degenerated into a most abominable meeting for the purpose
of a conspiracy ; those of the trade who did not join their
society were summoned, and even the apprentices, and were
told unless they conformed to the practices of these journey-
men, when they came out of their times they should not
be employed." Notwithstanding the fact that the employers
had themselves recognised and negotiated with the society,
the Recorder sentenced all the defendants to two years'
imprisonment. 2
Twelve years later it was the brutaUty of another prose-
cution of the compositors that impressed Francis Place with
the necessity of an alteration in the law. " The cruel
persecutions," he writes, " of the Journeymen Printers
employed in The Times newspaper in 1810 were carried to
an almost incredible extent. The judge who tried and
* See, for instance, The Times from 17th to 25th of June 1819.
* An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Dispute between the Masters
and Journeymen Printers exemplified in the Trial at large, with Remarks
Thereon, 1799, a rare pamphlet, in the Goldsmiths' Library at the Univer-
sity of London.
*' Bloody Black Jack" 79
sentenced some of them was the Common Sergeant of
London, Sir John Sylvester, commonly known by the cogno-
men of ' Bloody Black Jack.' ... No judge took more
pains than did this judge on the unfortunate printers, to
make it appear that their offence was one of great enormity,
to beat down and alarm the really respectable men who
had fallen into his clutches, and on whom he inflicted
scandalously severe sentences." ^ Nor did prosecution
always depend on the caprice of an employer. In Decem-
ber 1817 the Bolton constables, accidentally getting to
know that ten delegates of the cahco-printers from the
various districts of the kingdom were to meet on New
Year's Day, arranged to arrest the whole body and seize
all their papers. The ten delegates suffered three months'
imprisonment, although no dispute with their employers
was in progress, ^ But the main use of the law to the
employers was to checkmate strikes, and ward off demands
for better conditions of labour. Already, in 1786, the law
of conspiracy had been strained to convict, and punish with
two years' imprisonment, the five London bookbinders
who were leading a strike to reduce hours from twelve to
eleven.^ When, at the Aberdeen Master Tailors' Gild, in
1797, " it was represented to the trade that their joumejnnen
had entered into an illegal combination for the purpose of
raising their wages," the masters unanimously " agreed
not to give any additional wages to their servants," and
backed up this resolution of their own combination by
getting twelve journeymen prosecuted and fined for the
crime of combining.* In 1799 the success of the London
shoemakers in picketing obnoxious employers led to the
prosecution of two of them, which was made the means of
inducing the men to consent to dissolve their society, then
^ Place MSS. 27798 — 8 ; Times, November 9, 1810.
* Report in Manchester Exchange Herald, preserved in Place MSS.
27799—156.
^ Bookfinishers' Friendly Circular, 1845-51, pp. 5, 21.
* Bain's Merchant and Craft Gilds of Aberdeen, p. 261. An earlier
combination of 1768 is also mentioned.
8o The Struggle for Existence
seven years old, and return to work at once.^ Two other
shoemakers of York were convicted in the same year for
the crime of " combining to raise the price of their labour in
making shoes, and refusing to make shoes under a certain
price," and counsel said that " in every great town in the
North combinations of this sort existed." ^ The coach-
makers' strike of 1819 was similarly stopped, and the
" Benevolent Society of Coachmakers " broken up by the
conviction of the general secretary and twenty other
members, who were, upon this condition, released on their
own recognisances.^ In 1819 some calico-engravers in the
service of a Manchester firm protested against the undue
multiplication of apprentices by their employers, and
enforced their protest by declining to work. For this
" conspiracy " they were fined and imprisoned.* And
though the master cutlers were allowed, with impunity, to
subscribe to the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing
Union, which fixed the rates of wages, and brought pressure
to bear on recalcitrant employers, the numerous trade clubs
of the operatives were not left unmolested. In 1816 seven
scissor-grinders were sentenced to three months' imprison-
ment for belonging to what they called the " Misfortune
Club," which paid out-of-work benefit, and sought to main-
tain the customary rates.^
^ R. V. Hammond and Webb, 2 Esp. 719 ; see the Morning Chronicle
report, preserved in Place MSS. 27799 — 29.
^ Star, November 26, 1799.
3 R. V. Connell and others, Times, July 10, 1819.
* R. V. Ferguson and Edge, 2 St. 489.
* Sheffield Iris, December 17, 18 16. The men's clubs often existed
under the cloak of friendly societies. In the overseers' return of sick
clubs, made to ParUament in 1815, the following trade friendly societies
are included, many of these, at any rate, being essentially Trade Unions :
Tailors, with 360 members, and ;^740
Braziers,
„ 664
., 1768
Masons,
., 693
.. 1852
Scissorsmiths,
,. 550
.. 1309
Filesmiths,
,, 260
, „ 600
United Silversmiths,
>> 240 ,
,. \299
Cutlers,
.. 65
.. 450
Grinders,
.. 283
Sheffield Iris, 1851
Legal Persecution 8i
But it was in the new textile industries that the weight
of the Combination Laws was chiefly felt. White and
Henson describe the Act of 1800 as being in these trades
" a tremendous millstone roimd the neck of the local
artisan, which has depressed and debased him to the earth :
every act which he has attempted, every measure that he
has devised to keep up or raise his wages, he has been
told was illegal : the whole force of the civil power and
influence of the district has been exerted against him because
he was acting illegally : the magistrates, acting, as they
beheved, in unison with the views of the legislature, to
check and keep down wages and combination, regarded, in
almost every instance, every attempt on the part of the
artisan to amehorate his situation or support his station in
society as a species ef sedition and resistance of the Govern-
ment : every committee or active man among them was
regarded as a turbulent, dangerous instigator, whom it was
necessary to watch and crush if possible." ^ To cite one
only of the instances, it was given in e\'idence before Hume's
Committee that in 1818 certain Bolton millowners suggested
to the operative weavers that they should concert together
to leave the employment of those who paid below the current
rate. Acting on this hint a meeting of forty delegates took
place, at which it was resolved to ask for the advance agreed
to by the good employers. A fortnight later the president
and the two secretaries were arrested, convicted of conspiracy,
and imprisoned for one and two years respectively, although
their employers gave evidence on the prisoners' behalf to
the effect that they had themselves requested the men to
attend the meeting, and had approved the resolutions
passed. 2 In the following year fifteen cotton-spinners of
Manchester, who had met " to receive contributions to
bury their dead," under " Articles " sanctioned by Quarter
Sessions in 1795, were seized in the committee-room by the
police, and committed to trial for conspiracy, bail being
1 A Few Remarks, etc., p. 86,
2 Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 395.
82 The Struggle for Existence
refused. After three or four months' imprisonment they
were brought to trial, the whole local bar — seven in number
— being briefed against them. Collections were made in
London and elsewhere (including the town of Lynn in
Norfolk) for their defence. The enrolment of their club as
a friendly society availed little. It was urged in court that
" all societies, whether benefit societies or otherwise, were
only cloaks for the people of England to conspire against
the State," and most of the defendants were sentenced to
varying terms of imprisonment.^
But the Scottish Weavers' Strike of 1812, described in
the preceding chapter, is the most striking case of all. In
the previous year certain cotton-spinners had been con-
victed of combination and imprisoned, the judge observing
that there was a clear remedy in law, as the magistrates had
full power and authority to fix rates of wages or settle
disputes. In 1812 many of the employers refused to
accept the rates which the justices had declared as fair for
weaving ; and all the weavers at the forty thousand looms
between Aberdeen and CarKsle struck to enforce the justices'
rates. The employers had already made overtures through
the sheriff of the county for a satisfactory settlement when
the Government arrested the central committee of five, who
were directing the proceedings. These men were sentenced
to periods of imprisonment varying from four to eighteen
months ; the strike failed, and the association broke . up.^
The student of the newspapers between 1800 and 1824 will
find abundant record of judicial barbarities, of which the
cases cited above may be taken as samples. No statistics
exist as to the frequency of the prosecutions or the severity
of the sentences ; but it is easy to understand, from such
reports as are available, the sullen resentment which the
working class suffered under these laws. Their repeal was
^ See the Gorgon for January and February 1819.
^ Second Report of Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 62.
For other cases, see The Town Labourer, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917,
pp. 130-33-
A Labour Aristocracy 83
a necessary preliminary to the growth among the most
oppressed sections of the workers of any real power of pro-
tecting themselves, by Trade Union effort, against the
degradation of their Standard of Life.
The failure of the Combination Laws to suppress the
somewhat dictatorial Trade Unionism of the skilled handi-
craftsmen, and their efficacy in preventing the growth of
permanent Unions among other sections of the workers, is
explained by class distinctions, now passed away or greatly
modified, which prevailed at the beginning of the present
century. To-day, when we speak of " the aristocracy of
labour " we include under that heading the organised
miners and factory operatives of the North on the same
superior footing as the skilled handicraftsman. In 1800
they were at opposite extremes of the social scale in the
wage-earning class, the weaver and the miner being then
further removed from the handicraftsman than the docker
or general labourer is from the Lancashire cotton-spinner
or Northumberland hewer of to-day. The skilled artisans
formed, at any rate in London, an intermediate class
between the shopkeeper and the great mass of unorganised
labourers or operatives in the new machine industries.
The substantial fees demanded all through the eighteenth
century for apprenticeship to the " crafts " had secured to
the members and their eldest sons a virtual monopoly.^
Even after the repeal of the laws requiring a formal appren-
ticeship some time had to elapse before the supply of this
class of handicraftsmen overtook the growing demand.
Thus we gather from the surviving records that these trades
have never been more completely organised in London than
between 1800 and 1820. ^ We find the London hatters,
^ Throughout the century it seems to have been customary in most
handicrafts for the artisan to be allowed the privilege of apprenticing one
son, usually the eldest, free of charge. For other boys, especially for the
sons of parents not belonging to the trade, a fee of £5 to ;£20 was exacted
by the employer. The secretary of the Old Amicable Society of Wool-
staplers thirty years ago informed us that, as his brother had already
entered the trade, his father had to pay ;^ioo for his indentures.
* To take, for instance, the cabinetmakers and millwrights. When
84 The Struggle for Existence
coopers, curriers, compositors, millwrights, and shipwrights
maintaining earnings which, upon their own showing,
amounted to the comparatively large sum of thirty to fifty
shillings per week. At the same period the Lancashire
weaver or the Leicester hosier, in full competition with
steam-power and its accompaniment of female and child
labour, could, even when fully employed, earn barely ten
shillings. We see this difference in the Standard of Life
reflected in the characters ' of the combinations formed by
the two classes.
In the skilled handicrafts, long accustomed to corporate
government, we find, even under repressive laws, no unlaw-
ful oaths, seditious emblems, or other common paraphernaUa
of secret societies. The London Brushmakers, whose
Union apparently dates from the early part of the eighteenth
century, expressly insisted " that no person shall be admitted
a member who is not well affected to his present Majesty
and the Protestant Succession, and in good health and of
a respectable character." But this loyalty was not incon-
sistent with their subscribing to the funds of the 1831
agitation for the Reform Bill.^ The prevaihng tone of the
superior workmen down to 1848 was, in fact, strongly
Radical ; and their leaders took a prominent part in all the
working-class politics of the time. From their ranks came
such organisers as Place, Lovett, and Gast.^ But wherever
Lovett came to London in 181 9 he found that he could not get employment
without joining the Union {Life of William Lovett, by himself). The
millwrights at the beginning of the century were so strongly organised —
this probably led to the engineering employers' petition in 1799 out of
which the Combination Acts sprang — that when Fairbairn (after being
actually engaged at Rennie's works) was refused admission iilto their
society, he was driven to tramp out of London in search of work in a
non-union district {Life of Sir William Fairbairn, by himself, 1877, .
pp. 89, 92). For the last three-quarters of the century a considerable
proportion of the cabinetmakers and engineers employed in London have
been outside the Trade Union ranks. :^^
^ Articles of the Society of Journeymen Brushmakers, held at the sign of
the Craven Head, Drury Lane, 1806 ; Minutes, April 27, 1831.
* John Gast, a shipwright of Deptford, was evidently one of the ablest
Trade Unionists of his time. We first hear of him in 1802, when there was
a serious strike in London that attracted the attention of the Government
John Gast 85
we hav'e been able to gain any idea of their proceedings,
their trade clubs were free from anything that could now
be conceived as poHtical sedition. It was these clubs of
handicraftsmen that formed the backbone of the various
" central committees " which dealt with the main topics of
Trade Unionism during the next thirty years. They it
was who furnished such assistance as was given by working
men to the movement for the repeal of the Combination
Laws. And their influence gave a certain dignity and
stability to the Trade Union Movement, without which,
under hostile governments, it could never have emerged
from the petulant rebellions of hunger-strikes and machine-
breaking.
The principal effect of the Combination Laws on these
well-organised handicrafts in London, Liverpool, Dubhn,
and perhaps other towns, was to make the internal disci-
pline more rigid and the treatment of non-unionists more
arbitrary. Place describes how " in these societies there
are some few indi\dduals who possess the confidence of their
fellows, and when any matter relating to the trade has
(Home Office Papers in Record Office, 65 — i, July and August 1802), as
the author of a striking pamphlet entitled A Vindication of the Conduct of
the Shipwrights during the late disputes with their Employers (1802, 38 pp.).
In 1 81 8 he is found advocating the first recorded proposal for a general
workmen's organisation, as distinguished from separate trade clubs — to
be described in our next chapter; and his Articles of the Philanthropic
Hercules for the Mutual Support of the Labouring Mechanics, which were
printed in the Gorgon, attracted the attention of Francis Place, who de-
scribed him (Place MSS, 27819 — 23) as having " long been secretary to the
Shipwrights' Club : he weis a steady, respectable man. He had formed
several associations of working men, but had been^nable to keep up any
one of them." He became one of Place's most useful alhes in the agitation
for a repeal of the Combination Laws, and when, in 1825, their re-enactment
was threatened, his " committee of trades delegates " was Place's strongest
support. Gast was the leading spirit in the establishment of the Trades
Newspaper in July 1825, and became chairman of the committee of
management, as well as a frequent contributor. In the same year he was
actively engaged in the shipwrights' struggle for a " Book of Rates," or
definite list of piecework prices, and the energy with which he counter-
acted the design of the Board of Admiralty, of allowing the London ship-
builders to borrow men from the Portsmouth Navy Yard, contributed
mainly to the success of the fight.
86 The Struggle for Existence
been talked over, either at the club or in a separate room,
or in a workshop or a yard, and the matter has become
notorious, these men are expected to direct what shall be
done, and they do direct — simply by a hint. On this the
men act ; and one and all support those who may be
thrown out of work or otherwise inconvenienced. If
matters were to be discussed as gentlemen seem to suppose
they must be, no resolution would ever be come to. The
influence of the men alluded to would soon cease if the law
were repealed. It is the law and the law alone which causes
the confidence of the men to be given to their leaders.
Those who direct are not known to the body, and not one
man in twenty, perhaps, knows the person of any one who
directs. It is a^rule among them to ask no questions, and
another rule among them who know most, either to give
no answer if questioned, or an answer to mislead." ^
In the new machine industries, on the other hand, the
repeated reductions of wages, the rapid alterations of pro-
cesses, and the substitution of women and children for
adult male workers, had gradually reduced the workers to
a condition of miserable poverty. The reports of Parlia-
mentary committees, from 1800 onward, contain a dreary
record of the steady degradation of the Standard of Life in
the textile industries. " The sufferings of persons employed
in the cotton manufacture," Place writes of this period,
" were beyond credibility : they were drawn into combina-
tions, betrayed, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and
monstrously severe punishments inflicted on them : they
were reduced to and kept in the most wretched state of
existence." ^ Their employers, instead of being, as in the
older handicrafts, little more than master workmen, recog-
1 Place MSS. 27800 — 195.
2 Place MSS. 27798 — 11 ; and The Town Labourer, 1760-1832, by
J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917. Between 1798-1803 and 1804-16 the
piecework wages for handloom cotton weaving were reduced in some cases
by 80 per cent at a time of war prices (Geschichte der englischen Lohn-
arbeit, by Gustav Steffen, Stuttgart, 1900, vol. ii. pp. 19-20). See History
of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years, by G. H.
"Wood, 1910 ; and Cunningham, Growth, etc., 1903, p. 634.
The Luddites 87
nising the customary Standard of Life of their journeymen,
were often capitahst entrepreneurs, devoting their whole
energies to the commercial side of the business, and leaving
their managers to buy labour in the market at the cheapest
possible rate. This labour was recruited from all localities
and many different occupations. It was brigaded and
controlled by despotic laws, enforced by numerous fines
and disciplinary deductions. Cases of gross tyranny and
heartless cruelty are not wanting. Without a common
standard, a common tradition, or mutual confidence, the
workers in the new mills were helpless against their masters.
Their ephemeral combinations and frequent strikes were, a^
a rule, only passionate struggles to maintain a bare subsist-
ence wage. In place of the steady organised resistance to
encroachments maintained by the handicraftsmen, we
watch, in the machine industries, the alternation of out-
bursts of machine-breaking and outrages, with intervals of
abject submission and reckless competition with each other
for employment. In the conduct of such organisation as
there was, repressive laws had, with the operatives as with
the London artisans, the effect of throwing great power into
the hands of a few men. These leaders were implicitly
obeyed in times of industrial conflict, but the repeated
defeats which they were unable to avert prevented that
growth of confidence which is indispensable for permanent
organisation. 1 Both leaders and rank and file, too, were
largely impUcated in political seditions, and were the victims
of spies and Ministerial emissaries of all sorts. All these
circumstances led to the prevalence among them of fearful
oaths, mystic initiation rites, and other manifestations of a
sensationaHsm which was sometimes puerile and sometimes
criminal.
The most notJorious of these " seditions," about which
little is really known, was the " Luddite " upheaval of
1811-12, when riotous mobs of manual workers, acting
^ See on all these points the evidence given before the Committee on
Artisans and Machinery. 1824 ; especially that of Richmond.
88 The Struggle for Existence
under some sort of organisation, went about destroying
textile machinery and sometimes wrecking factories. To
what extent this had any direct connection with the Trade
Union Movement seems to us, pending more penetrating
investigation of the unpubHshed evidence, somewhat
uncertain. That the operatives very generally sympathised
with the most violent protest against the displacement of
hand labour by machinery, and the extreme distress which
it was causing, is clear. The Luddite movement apparently
began among the Framework-knitters, who had long been
organised in local clubs, with some rudimentary federal
bond ; and the whole direction of the Luddites was often
ascribed, as by the Mayor of Leicester in 1812, to " the
Committee of Framework-knitters, who have as complete
an organisation of the whole body as you could have of a
regiment." ^ But fnoney was collected from men of other
trades, notably bricklayers, masons, spinners, weavers,
and colliers, as well as from the soldiers in some of the
regiments stationed at provincial centres ; and such evi-
dence as we have found points rather to a widespread secret
oath-bound conspiracy, not of the men of any one trade,
but of wage-earners of all kinds. We find an informer
stating (June 22, 1812), with what truth we know not,
" that the Union extends from London to Nottingham,
and from thence to Manchester and Carlisle. Small towns
lying between the principal places are not yet organised,
such as Garstang and Burton. Only some of the trades
have taken the first oath. He says there is a second oath
taken by suspicious persons." ^ On the other hand, it looks
as if the various local Trade Clubs were made use of, in
some cases informally, as agents or branches of the con-
spiracy.
General Maitland, writing from Buxton (June 22, 1812)
to the Home Secretary, says that, in his opinion, " the whole
of this business , . . originated in those constant efforts
1 Letter to the local Major-General, June 15, 1812, in Home Office
Papers, 40 — i. 2, Ibid.
"KiugLud" 89
made by these associations for many 3'ears past to keep up
the price of the manufacturers' wages ; that finding their
efforts for this unavaihng, both from the circumstances of
the trade and the high price of provisions, they in a moment
of irritation, for which it is but just to say they had con-
siderable ground from the real state of distress in which they
were placed . . . began to think of effecting that by force
which they had ever been trying to do by other means ;
and that in this state the oath was introduced. ... I
believe the whole to be, certainly a most mischievous, but
undefined and indistinct attempt to be in a state of pre-
paration to do that by force which they had not succeeded
in carrying into effect as they usually did by other means."
The whole episode has been too much ignored, even by
social historians ; and " Byron's famous speech and
Charlotte Bronte's more famous novel give to most people
their idea of the misery of the time, and of its cause, the
displacement of hand labour by machinery." ^
The coal-miners were in many respects even worse off
than the hosiery workers and the cotton weavers. In
Scotland they had been but lately freed from actual serfdom,
the final act of emancipation not having been passed until
1799. In Monmouthshire and South Wales the oppression
of the " tommy shops " of the small employers was extreme.
In the North of England the " yearly bond," the truck
^ The Town Labourer, 1^60-18^2, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 191 7,
p. 15. Whether Gravener Henson, the bobbin-net maker of Nottingham,
subsequently author of a History of the Framework-Knitters (1831), who had
long been a leader of the Framework-knitters, was the " King Lud "
under whose orders the machine-breakers often purported to act, is yet
unproven {Life of Francis Place, by Prof. Graham Wallas, revised edition,
1918). The Report of the House of Commons Committee on the Frame-
work-knitters' petitions (1812) affords evidence of the all-pervading misery
of the time. For other ghmpses of the Luddite organisation, see An
Appeal to the Public, containing an account of services rendered during the
disturbances in the North of England in the year 1812, by Francis Raynes,
1 81 7 (in Home Office Papers, 40) ; Report of Proceedings under Commission
of Oyer and Terminer, January 2 to 12, 18 13, at York, by J. and W. B.
Gurney, 1813 ; Digest of Evidence of Committee on Artizans and Machinery,
by George White, 1824 (see p. 36, Richmond's evidence as to the appeals of
the Luddites to the Glasgow cotton-spinners) ; and Annual Register, 1812.
go The Struggle for Existence
system, and the arbitrary fines kept the underground
workers in complete subjection. The result is seen in the
turbulence of their frequent " sticks " or strikes, during
which troops were often required to quell their violence.
The great strike of 1810 was carried on by an oath-bound
confederacy recruited by the practice of " brothering," " so
named because the members of the union bound themselves
by a most solemn oath to obey the orders of the brotherhood,
under the penalty of being stabbed through the heart or of
having their bowels ripped up," ^
Notwithstanding these differences between various
classes of workers, the growing sense of solidarity among
the whole body of wage-earners rises into special prominence
during this period of tyranny and repression. The trades
in which it was usual for men to tramp from place to place
in search of employment had long possessed, as we have
seen, some kind of loose federal organisation extending
throughout the country. In spite of the law of 1797 for-
bidding the existence of " corresponding societies," the
various federal organisations of Curriers, Hatters, CaUco-
printers, Woolcombers, Woolstaplers, and other handi-
craftsmen kept up constant correspondence on trade matters,
and raised money for common trade purposes. In some
cases there existed an elaborate national organisation,
with geographical districts and annual delegate meetings,
like that of the Calico-printers who were arrested by tlie
Bolton constables in 1818. The rules of the Papermakers,-
which certainly date from 1803, provide for the division of
England into five districts, with detailed arrangements for
^ Evidence of a colliery engineer in the Newcastle district before
Committee on Combination Laws, 1825 ; summarised in Report on Trade
Societies, i860, by Social Science Association. See also A Voice from the
Coalmines, 1825 ; A Candid Appeal to the Coalowners and Viewers of
Collieries on the Tyne and Wear, including a copy of the Collier's Bond, with
Animadversions thereon and a series of proposed Amendments, from the
Committee of the Colliers' United Association, 1826 (in Home Office Papers,
H.O. 40 (19), with Lord Londonderry's letter of February 28, 1826) ; The
Miners of Northumberland and Durham, by Richard Fynes, pp. 12-16
(1873) ; An Earnest Address . . . on behalf of the Pitmen, by W. Scott, 1831.
* See Appendix to Report of Select Committee on Combinations, 1825.
The Liverpool Ropemakers 91
representation and collective action. This national organi-
sation was, notwithstanding repressive laws, occasionally
very effective. We need cite only one instance, furnished
by the Liverpool Ropemakers in 1823. WTien a certain
firm attempted to put labourers to the work, the local
society of ropespinners informed it that this was " contrary
to the regulations of the trade," and withdrew all their
members. The employers, faihng to get men in Liverpool,
sent to Hull and Newcastle, but found that the Ropespinners'
Society had already apprised the local trade clubs at those
towns. The firm then imported " blacklegs " from Glasgow,
who were met on arrival by the local unionists, inveigled to
a " trade club-house," and alternately threatened and
cajoled out of their engagements. Finally the head of the
firm went to London to purchase yam ; but the London
workmen, finding that the yam was for a " struck shop,"
refused to complete the order. The last resource of the
employers was an indictment at the Sessions for combina-
tion, but a Liverpool jury, in the teeth of the evidence and
the judge's summing up, gave a verdict of acquittal.^
Ihis soHdarity was not confined to the members of a
particular trade. The masters are always complaining
that one trade supports another, and old account books of
Trade Unions for this period abound with entries of sums
contributed in aid of disputes in other trades, either in the
same towTi or elsewhere. Thus the small society of London
Goldbeaters, during the three years 1810-12, lent or gave
substantial sums, amounting in all to /200, to fourteen other
trades. 2 The Home Secretary was informed in 1823 that
^ R. V. Yates and Others, Liverpool Sessions, August lo, 1823. See
newspaper report preserved in Place MSS. 27804 — 154.
2 The entries in this old cash-book are of some interest :
May 29, 1 8 10 Paid ye Brushmakers . . . • ;6'i5 o o
Lent ye Brushmakers .
Paid ye Friziers .
June 26, 1810 Paid ye Silversmiths .
Expenses to Pipemakers
July 24, 1 810 Paid ye Braziers .
Paid ye Bookbinders .
Paid ye Curriers .
10 o o
20 o o
1000
o 4 10
10 ,10 o
1000
10 o o
92 The Struggle for Existence
a combination of cotton-spinners at Bolton, whose books had
been seized, had received donations, not only from twenty-
eight cotton-spinners' committees in as many Lancashire
towns, but also from fourteen other trades, from coal-miners
to butchers.^ A picturesque illustration of this brotherly
help in need occurs in the account of an appeal to the
Pontefract Quarter Sessions by certain Sheffield cutlers
against their conviction for combination : " The appellants
were in court, but hour after hour passed, and no counsel
moved the case. The reason was a want of funds for the
purpose. At last, whilst in court, a remittance from the
clubs in Manchester, to the amount of one hundred pounds,
arrived, and then the counsel was fee'd, and the case, which,
but for the arrival of the money from this town, must have
dropped in that stage, was proceeded with." ^ And
although the day of Trades Councils had not yet come, it
was a common thing for the various trade societies of a
particular town to unite in sending witnesses to Parlia-
mentary Committees, preparing petitions to the House of
Commons and paying counsel to support their case, engaging
solicitors to prosecute offending employers, and collecting
subscriptions for strikes.^ This tendency to form joint
Aug. 21, 1810 Lent ye Bit and Spurmakeis .
Lent ye Scaiemakers .
Paid ye Leathergrounders .
Oct. 26, 1 8 10 Paid ye Tinplate Workers
Dec. II, 1810 Lent ye Ropemakers .
May 30, 1 81 1 Received of Scale Beam-makers
June 25, 1811 Expenses with Papermakers
July 20, 1812 Lent ye Sadlers ....
Oct. 12,1812 Paid to Millwrights .
Dec. 7, 1 81 2 Borrowed from the Musical Instru-
ment-makers
* Home Office Papers, 40 — 18, March 31, 1823.
^ See report in the Manchester Exchange Herald, about 181 8. preserved
in Place MSS. 27799 — 156.
^ See, for instance, the witnesses delegated by the Glasgow and Man-
chester trades to the Select Committee on Petitions of Artisans, etc., report
of June 13, 181 1 ; or the joint action of the Yorkshire and West of England
Woollen-workers given in evidence before the Select Committee of 1806.
These cases are typical of many others.
.65
0
0
5
0
0
5
0
0
30
0
0
10
0
0
5
0
0
0
12
6
10
0
0
50
0
0
The Class War
93
committees of local trades was, as we shall see, greatly
strengthened in the agitation against the Combination Laws
from 1823-25. With the final abandonment of all legis-
lative protection of the Standard of Life, and the complete
divorce of the worker from the instruments of production,
the wage-earners in the various industrial centres became
indeed ever more conscious of the widening of the old
separate trade disputes into " the class war " which has
characterised the past century.
It is difficult to-day to realise the naive surprise with
which the employers of that time regarded the practical
development of working - class solidarity. The master
\vitnesses before Parliamentary Committees, and the judges
in sentencing workmen for combination, are constantly
found reciting instances of mutual help to prove the exist-
ence of a v^ddespread " conspiracy " against the dominant
classes. That the London Tailors should send money to the
Glasgow Weavers, or the Goldbeaters to the Ropespinners,
seemed to the middle and upper classes httle short of a
cpme.
The movement for a repeal of the Combination Laws
began in a period of industrial dislocation and severe
poHtical repression. The economic results of the long war,
culminating in the comparatively low prices of the peace
for most manufactured products, though not for wheat,
led in 1816 to an almost universal reduction of wages
throughout the country. In open defiance of the law the
masters, in many instances, deUberately combined in
agreements to pay lower rates. This agreement was not
confined to the employers in a particular trade, who may
have been confronted by organised bodies of journe3nnen,
but extended, in some cases, to aU employers of labour in a
particular locality. The landowners and farmers of Tiver-
ton, for instance, at a " numerous and respectable meeting
at the Town Hall " in 1816, resolved " that, in consequence
of the low price of provisions," not more than certain
specified wages should be given to smiths, carpenters.
94 The Struggle for Existence
masons, thatchers, or masons' labourers.^ The Compositors,
Coopers, Shoemakers, Carpenters, and many other trades
record serious reductions of wages at this period. In these
cases the masters justified their action on the ground that,
owing to the fall of prices, the Standard of Life of the
journeymen would not be depressed. But in the great
staple industries there ensued a cutting competition between
employers to secure orders in a falling market, their method
being to undersell each other by beating down wages below
subsistence level — an operation often aided by the practice,
then common, of supplementing insufficient earnings out of
the Poor Rate. This produced such ruinous results that
local protests were soon made. At Leicester the authorities
decided to maintain the men's " Statement Price " b}'
agreeing to wholly support out of a voluntary fund those
who could not get work at the full rates. This was bitterly
resented by the neighbouring employers, who seriously
contemplated indicting the lord-lieutenant, mayor, alder-
men, clergy, and other subscribers for criminal conspiracy
to keep up wages. ^ And in 1820 a pubhc meeting of the
ratepayers of Sheffield protested against the " evil of parish
pay to supplement earnings," and recommended employers
to revert to the uniform price hst which the men had gained
in 1810.^ Finally we have the employers themselves
publicly denouncing the ruinous extent to which the cutting
of wages had been carried. A declaration dated June 16,
1819, and signed by fourteen Lancashire manufacturers,
'^ Printed handbill signed by thirty-two persons, issued in the summer
of 1816, preserved in Place MSS. 27799 — 141. Place has also preserved
the rejoinder of the workmen, which is unsigned, as he notes, for fear of
prosecution.
* The Stocking Makers' Monitor, January 1818 : A few Remarks on the
State of the Law, etc., by White and Henson, p. 88 ; An Appeal to the Public
on the subject of the Framework-Knitters' Fund, by the Rev. Robert Hall
(Leicester, 18 19) ; Cobbett's Weekly Register, vol. xxxix. ; A Reply to the
Principal Objections advanced by Cobbett and Others, by the Rev. Robert
Hall (Leicester, 1821) : Digest of Evidence before the Committee on Artizans
and Machinery, by George White, 1824.
3 Proceedings at a public Meeting of the Inhabitants of the Township of
Sheffield, held at the Town Hall, March /jr. iSzo (Sheffield, 1820, 16 pp.).
The Weavers' Provident Union 95
regrets that they have been compelled by th6 action of a few
competitors to lower wages to the present rates, and strongly
condemns any fm-ther reduction ; whilst twenty-five of the
most eminent calico-printing firms append an emphatic
approval of the protest, and state " that the system of
papng such extremely low wages for manufacturing labour
is injurious to the trade at large." 1 At Coventry the
ribbon manufacturers combined \\dth the Weavers' Provi-
dent Union to maintain a general adherence to the agreed
list of prices, and in 1819 subscribed together no less than
£16,000 to cover the cost of proceedings with this object.
This combination formed the subject of an indictment at
War\vick Assizes, which put an end to the association, the
remaining funds being handed over to the local " Streets
Commissioners " for paving the city. These protests and
struggles of the better employers were in vain. Rates were
reduced and strikes occurred all over the country, and were
met, not by redress or sympathy, but by an outburst of
prosecutions and sentences of more than the usual ferocity.
The common law and ancient statutes were ruthlessly used
to supplement the Combination Acts, often by strained
construcrions. The Scotch judges in particular, as an
eminent Scotch jurist declared to the Parhamentary Com-
mittee in 1824, appUed the criminal procedure of Scotland
to cases of simple combination, from 1 813-19, in a way
that he, on becoming Lord Advocate, refused to counte-
nance. 2 The workers, on attempting some spasmodic pre-
parations for organised poUtical agitation, were further
coerced, in 1819, by the infamous " Six Acts," which at one
blow suppressed practically all pubUc meetings, enabled
the magistrate to search for arms, subjected all working-
class pubUcations to the crushing stamp duty, and rendered
more stringent the law relating to seditious Hbels. The
whole system of repression which had characterised the
^ Times, August 5, 1819.
2 Evidence of Sir William Rae, Bart., before Select Committee on
Artisans and Machinerj', 1824, p. 486.
96 The Struggle for Existence
statesmanship of the Regency culminated at this period in
a tyranny not exceeded by any of the monarchs of the
" Holy Alliance." The effect of this tyranny was actually
to shield the Combination Laws by turning the more ener-
getic and enlightened working-class leaders away from all
specific reforms to a thorough revolution of the whole system
of Parliamentary representation. Hence there was no
popular movement whatever for the repeal of the Com-
bination Laws. If we were writing the history of the English
. working class instead of that of the Trade Union Movement,
we should find in William Cobbett or " Orator " Hunt, in
Samuel Bamford or William Lovett, a truer representative
of the current aspirations of the English artisan at this
time than in the man who now came unexpectedly on
the scene to devise and carry into effect the Trade Union
Emancipation of 1824.
Francis Place was a master tailor who had created a
successful business in a shop at Charing Cross. Before
setting up for himself he had worked as a journeyman
breeches-maker, and had organised combinations in his own
and other trades. After 1818 he left the conduct of the
business to his son, and devoted his -keenly practical intellect
and extraordinary persistency first to the repeal of the
Combination Laws, and next to the Reform Movement.
In social theory he was a pupil of Bentham and
James Mill, and his ideal may be summed up as political
Democracy with industrial liberty, or, as we should now
say, thoroughgoing Radical Individualism. No one who
has closely studied his life and work will doubt that, within
the narrow sphere to which his unswerving practicality con-
fined him, he was the most remarkable politician of his age.
His chief merit lay in his thorough understanding of the
art of getting things done. In agitation, permeation,
wire-pulling, Parliamentary lobbying, the drafting of
resolutions, petitions, and bills — in short, of all those arti-
fices by which a popular movement is first created and then
made effective on the ParUamentary system — he was an
Francis Place 97
inventor and tactician of the first order. Above all, he
possessed in perfection the rare quahty of permitting other
people to carry off the credit of his work, and thus secured
for his proposals wiUing promoters and supporters, some of
the leading Parhamentary figures of the time owing all their
knowledge on his questions to the briefs with which he
bupphed them. The invaluable collection of manuscript
records left by him, now in the British Museum, prove that
modesty had nothing to do with his contemptuous readi-
ness to leave the trophies of \dct0r3' to his pawns pro\'ided
his end was attained. He was thoroughly appreciative of
the fact that in every progressive movement his shop at
Charing Cross was the real centre of power when the Parha-
mentary stage of a progressive movement was reached.
It remained, from 1807 down to about 1834, the recognised
meeting-place of all the agitators of the time.^
It was in watching the effect of the Combination Laws
in his own trade that Place became converted to their
repeal. The special laws of 1720 and 1767, fixing the
wages of journe}Tnen tailors, as well as the general law
of 1800 against all combinations, had failed to regulate
wages, to prevent strikes, or to hinder those masters who
wished in times of pressure to engage skilled men, from
offering the bribe of high piecework rates, or even time
wages in excess of the legal limit. Place gave e\4dence
as a master tailor before the Select Committee of the House
of Commons which inquired into the subject in 1810 ; and
it was chiefly his weighty testimony in favour of freedom
of contract that averted the fresh legal restrictions which
a combination of employers was then openly promoting.'^
This experience of the practical freedom of employers to
combine intensified Place's sense of the injustice of den^dng
a like freedom to the journeymen, whilst the brutal prose-
^ An admirable biography has now been written. The Life of Francis
Place, iyyi-1854, by Prof. Graham Wallas ; first edition, 1 898 ; revised
edition, 1918.
^ Place MSS. 27798 — 8, 12, etc.; Times, November 9, 1810; The
Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896, pp. iio-n.
g8 The Struggle for Existence
cution of the compositors of the Times in the same year
brought home to his mind the severity of the law. Four
years later (1814), as he himself tells us, he " began to work
seriously to procure a repeal of the laws against combina-
tions of workmen, but for a long time made no visible
progress." The employers were firmly convinced that
combinations of wage-earners would succeed in securing a
great rise of wages, to the serious detriment of profits. Far
from contemplating a repeal of the Act of 1800, they were
in 1814 and 1816 pestering the Home Secretary for legis-
lation of greater stringency as the only safeguard for their
" freedom of enterprise." ^ The politicians were equally
certain that Trade Union action would raise prices, and
thus undermine the foreign trade upon which the pros-
perity and international influence of England depended.
The working men themselves afforded in the first instance
no assistance. Those who had suffered legal prosecution
were hopeless of redress from an unreformed Parliament,
and offered no support. One trade, the Spitalfields silk-
weavers, supported the Government because they enjoyed
what they deemed to be the advantage of legal protection
from the lowering of wages bj^^ competition. ^ Others were
suspicious of the intervention of one who was himself an
employer, and who had not yet gained recognition as a
friend to labour. But Place was undismayed by hostility
and indifference. Knowing that with an English public
the strength of his cause would lie, not in any abstract
^ See the petitions of the Master Manufacturers of Glasgow, Lancashire,
and Nottinghamshire, in the Home Office Papers (42 — 141, 149, 150, 195,
etc.).
* When Place in 1824 urged the " Committee of Engine Silk-weavers "
of Spitalfields to petition for a repeal of the Combination Laws, the meeting
" Resolved, that protected as we have been for years under the salutary
laws and wisdom of the Legislature, and being completelj- unapprehensive
of any sort of combination on our part, we cannot therefore take any sort
of notice of the invitation held out by Mr. Place." When this resolution
was put by the chairman, " an unanimous burst of applause followed,
with a multitude of voices exclaiming, ' The law, cling to the law, it will
protect us 1 ' " Place MSS. 27800 — 52 ; Morning Chronicle, February 9,
1824.
Joseph Hume 99
reasoning or appeal to natural rights, but in an enumeration
of actual cases of injustice, he made a point of obtaining
the particulars of every trade dispute. He intervened, as
he says, in every strike, sometimes as a mediator, sometimes
as an ally of the journeymen. He opened up a voluminous
correspondence with Trade Unions throughout the kingdom,
and wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers. In 1818
he secured a useful medium in the Gorgon} a httle working-
class political newspaper, started by one Wade, a wool-
comber, and subsidised by Bentham and Place himself.
This gained him his two most important disciples, event-
ually the chief instruments of his work, J. R. McCuUoch
and Joseph Hume. McCulloch, afterwards to gain fame as
an economist, was at that time the editor of the Scotsman,
perhaps the most important of the provincial newspapers.
A powerful article based on Place's facts which he con-
tributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1823 secured many
converts ; and his constant advocacy gave Place's idea a
weight and notoriety which it had hitherto lacked. Joseph
Hume was an even more important ally. His acknow-
ledged position in the House of Commons as one of the
leaders of the growing party of Philosophic Radicalism
gained for the repeal movement a steadily increasing support
with advanced members of Parhament. Among a certain
section in the House the desirability of freedom of com-
bination began to be discussed ; presently it was considered
practicable ; and soon many came to regard it as an inevit-
able outcome of their political creed. In 1822 Place
thought the time ripe for action ; and Hume accordingly
gave notice of his intention to bring in a Bill to repeal all
the laws against combinations.
Place's manuscripts and letters contain a graphic
account of the wire-pulhngs and manipulations of the next
two years. 2 In these contemporary pictures of the inner
* The volumes for 1818-19 are in the British Museum.
2 The story has now been well told in The Life of Francis Place, by
Prof. Graham Wallas, revised edition, 191 8, ch. viii. ; and in The Town
100 The Struggle for Existence
workings of the Parliamentary system we watch Hume
cajoUng Huskisson and Peel into granting him a Select
Committee, staving off the less tactful proposals of a rival
M.P.,^ and finally, in February 1824, packing the Com-
mittee of Inquiry at length appointed. Hume, with some
art, had included in his motion three distinct subjects —
the emigration of artisans, the exportation of machinery,
and combinations of workmen, all of which were forbidden
by law. To Place and Hume the repeal of the Combination
Laws was the main object ; but Huskisson and his colleagues
regarded the Committee as primarily charged with an
inquiry into the possibility of encouraging the rising manu-
facture of machinery, which was seriously hampered by
the prohibition of sales to foreign countries. Huskisson
tried to induce Hume to omit from the Committee's reference
all mention of the Combination Laws, evidently regarding
them as only a minor and unimportant part of the inquiry.
But Place and Hume were now masters of the situation ;
and for the next few months they devoted their whole time
to the management of the Committee. At first no one
seems to have had any idea that its proceedings were going
Labourer, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917, ch. vii. A few other details
will be found in Digest of Evidence before the Committee on Artisans
arid Machinery, by George White, 1824, and in Labour Legislation, Labour
Movements, and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902, pp. 43-57.
^ In 1823 George White, a " clerk of committees " of the House of
Commons, had formed an alliance with Gravener Henson, the bobbin-net
maker of Nottingham, who had long been a leader of the framework-knitters*
combinations, to whom reference has been made in preceding pages.
Together they prepared an elaborate Bill repealing all the Combination
Acts, and substituting a complicated machinery for regulating piecework
and settling industrial disputes. Some of these proposals were meritorious
anticipations of subsequent factory legislation ; but the time was not
ripe for such measures. This Bill, promptly introduced by Peter Moore,
the member for Coventry, had the effect of scaring some timid legislators,
and especially alarming the I'ront Bench. Hume was at a loss to know
how to act ; but Place, in a letter displaying great political sagacitj',
advised him to baulk the rival Bill by putting its author on the Committee
of Inquiry, explaining that " Moore is not a man to be put aside. The
only way to put him down is to let him talk his nonsense in the Committee,
where, being outvoted, he will be less of an annoyance in the House."
See Place MSS. 27798—12.
Packing tJie Committee loi
to be of any moment ; and no trouble was taken by the
Ministry with regard to its composition. " It was with
difficulty," writes Place, " that Mr. Hume could obtain
the names of . twenty-one members to compose the Com-
mittee ; but when it had sat three days, and had become
both popular and amusing, members contrived to be put
upon it ; and at length it consisted of forty-eight mem-
bers." ^ Hume, who was appointed chairman, appears to
have taken into his own hands the entire management of
the proceedings. A circular explaining the objects of the
inquiry was sent to the mayor or other public of&cer of
fort}^ provincial towns, and appeared in the principal local
newspapers. Public meetings were held at Stockport and
other towns to depute witnesses to attend the Committee.^
Meanwhile Place, who had by this time acquired the con-
fidence of the chief leaders of the working class, secured the
attendance of artisan witnesses from all parts of the kingdom.
Read in the light of Place's private records and daily corre-
spondence with Hume, the proceedings of this " Committee
on Artisans and Machinery" " reveal an almost perfect
example of poUtical manipulation. Although no hostile
witness was denied a hearing, it was evidently arranged that
the employers who were favourable to repeal should be
examined first, and that the preponderance of evidence
should be on their side. And whilst those interests which
would have been antagonistic to the repeal were neither
professionally represented nor dehberately organised, the
men's case was marshalled with admirable skill by Place,
and fully brought out by Hume's examination. Thus the
one acted as the Trade Unionists' Parliamentary solicitor,
and the other as their unpaid counsel.^
1 Place MSS. 27798—30.
* This attracted the attention of the Home Secretarj^ (Home Office
Papers, 40 — 18).
^ Place offered to act as Hume's " assistant " ; but the members of
the Committee, whose suspicions had been aroused, refused to permit him
to remain in the room, on the double ground that he was not a member of
the House, nor even a gentleman .'
102 The Struggle for Existence
Place himself tells us how he proceeded : " The delegates
from the working people had reference to me, and I opened
my house to them. Thus I had all the town and country
delegates under my care. I heard the story which every
one of these men had to tell, I examined and cross-examined
them, took down the leading particulars of each case,
and then arranged the matter as briefs for Mr. Hume, and
as a rule, for the guidance of the witnesses, a copy was
given to each. . . . Each brief contained the principal
questions and answers. . . , That for Mr. Hume was
generally accompanied by an appendix of documents
arranged in order, with a short account of such proceedings
as were necessary to put Mr. Hume in possession of the
whole case. Thus he was enabled to go on with considerable
ease, and to anticipate or rebut objections." ^
The Committee sat in private ; but Hume's numerous
letters to Place show how carefully the latter was kept
posted up in all the proceedings : "As the proceedings
of the Committee were printed from day to day for the
use of the members, I had a copy sent to me by Mr. Hume,
which I indexed on paper ruled in many columns, each
column having an appropriate head or number. I also
wrote remarks on the margins of the printed evidence ;
this was copied daily by Mr. Hume's secretary, and then
returned to me. This consumed much time, but enabled
Mr. Hume to have the whole mass constantly under his
view ; and I am very certain that less pains and care would
not have been sufficient to have carried the business
through." 2
From Westminster Hall we are transported, by these
private notes for Hume's use, all now preserved in the
British Museum, into the back parlour of the Charing
Cross shop, where the London and provincial artisan
witnesses came for their instructions. " The workmen,"
as Place tells us, " were not easily managed. It required
great care and pains not to shock their prejudices so as
1 Place MSS. 27798—22. * Ibid. 27798—23.
Repeal Triumphant 103
to prevent them doing their duty before the Committee.
They were filled with false notions, all attributing their
distresses to wrong causes, which I, in this state of the
business, dared not attempt to remove. Taxes, machinery,
laws against combinations, the will of the masters, the
conduct of magistrates— these were the fundamental causes
of all their sorrows and privations. ... I had to discuss
everything with them most carefully, to arrange and pre-
pare everything, and so completely did these things occupy
my time that for more than three months I had hardly
any rest." ^
The result of the inquiry was as Hume and Place had
ordained. A series of resolutions in favour of complete
freedom of combination and hberty of emigration was
adopted by the Committee, apparently without dissent.
A Bill to repeal all the Combination Laws and to legahse
trade societies was passed through both Houses, within
less than a week, at the close of the session, without either
debate or di\dsion. Place and Hume contrived privately
to talk over and to silence the few members who were aUve
to the situation ; and the measure passed, as Place remarks,
" almost without the notice of members within or news-
papers without." 2 So quietly was the Bill smuggled through
Parhament that the tnagistrates at a Lancashire town un-
wittingly sentenced certain cotton-weavers to imprison-
ment for combination some weeks after the laws against
that crime had been repealed.^
Place and Hume had, however, been rather too clever.
Whilst the governing classes were quite unconscious that
any important alteration of law or policy had taken place,
the unlooked-for success of Place's agitation produced, as
Nassau Senior describes, " a great moral effect " in all the
industrial centres. " It confirmed in the minds of the
^ Place MS. 27798 — 22.
^ The Act was 5 George IV. c. 95. The question of the exportation of
machinery was deferred until the next session.
^ Letter in the Manchester Gazette, preserved in the Place MSS.
27801 — 214.
104 The Struggle for Existence
operatives the conviction of the justice of their cause, tardily
and reluctantly, but at last fully, conceded by the Legis-
lature. That which was morally right in 1824 must have
been so, they would reason, for fifty years before. . . . They
conceived that they had extorted from the Legislature an
admission that their masters must always be their rivals,
and had hitherto been their oppressors, and that combina-
tions to raise wages, and shorten the time or diminish the
severity of labour, were not only innocent, but meritorious." ^
Trade Societies accordingly sprang into existence or emerged
into aggressive publicity on all sides. A period of trade
inflation, together with a rapid rise in the price of provisions,
favoured a general increase of wages. For the next six
months the newspapers are full of strikes and rumours of
strikes. Serious disturbances occurred at Glai^gow, where
the employers had been exceptionally oppressive, where the
cotton operatives committed several outrages, and where
a general lock-out took place. The cotton- spinners were
once more striking in the Manchester district. The ship-
ping trade of the North-East Coast was temporarily para-
lysed by a strong combination of the seamen on the T3ne
and Wear, who refused to sail except with Unionist seamen
and Unionist officers. The Dubhn trades, then the best
organised in the kingdom, ruthlessly enforced their bye-
laws for the regulation of their respective industries, and
formed a joint coijimittee, the so-called " Board of Green
Cloth," whose dictates became the terror of the emplo3-ers.
The Sheffield operatives have to be warned that, if they
persist in demanding double the former wages for only
three days a week work, the whole industry of the town
will be ruined.^ The London shipwrights insisted on what
their employers considered the preposterous demand for a
" book of rates " for piecework The London coopers
demanded a revision of their wages, which led to a long-
' MS. Report of Nassau Senior to Lord Melbourne ou Trade Combina-
tions (1831 ; unpublished ; in Home Office Library).
• SheJJicld Iris, .^pril .', 1825.
The Capitalist Reaction ' 105
sustained conflict. In fact, as a provincial newspaper
remarked a little later, " it is no longer a particular class of
journeymen at some single point that have been induced
to commence a strike for an advance of wages, but almost
the whole bod}^ of the mechanics in the kingdom are com-
bined in the general resolution to impose terms on their
employers."^
The opening of the session of 1825 found the employers
throughout the country thoroughly aroused. Hume and
Place had in vain preached moderation, and warned the
Unions of the danger of a reaction. The great shipowning
and shipbuilding interest, which had throughout the century
preserved intact its reputation for unswerving hostiUty to
Trade Unionism, had possession of the ear of Huskisson,
then President of the Board of Trade and member for
Liverpool. Early in the session he moved for a committee
of inquiry into the conduct of the workmen and the effect
of the recent Act, which, he complained, had been smuggled
through the House without his attention having been called
to the fact that it went far bejond the mere repeal of the
special statutes against combinations. ^ This time the
composition of the committee was not left to chance, or to
Hume's manipulation. The members were, as Place com-
plains, selected almost exclusively from the Ministerial
benches, twelve out of the thirty being placemen, and many
being representatives of rotten boroughs. Huskisson,^
''■ Sheffield Mercury October 8, 1825 ; see the Manchester Guardian for
August 1824 to a similar effect.
2 Later in the year Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, and Lord
Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, protested in debate that they had been quite
unaware of the passing of the Act, and that they would never have assented
to it.
^ The Annual Register for 1825 gives a fuller report of Huskisson 's
speech than Hansard's ParUamentary Debates. Further particulars are
supphed in George White's Abstract of the Act repealing the Laws against
Combinations of Workmen (1824) ; in Place's Observations on Mr. Huskis-
son's Speech on the Law relating to Combinations of Workmen, by F. P. (1825,
32 pp.) ; in Wallas's Life of Francis Place, revised edition, 1918, ch. viii. ;
in Hammond's The Town Labourer, ch. vii. ; and in Howell's Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, pp. 51-7.
E 2
io6 The Struggle for Existence
Peel, and the Attorney-General themselves took part in its
proceedings ; Wallace, the Master of the Mint, was made
chairman, and Hume alone represented the workmen.
Huskisson regarded the Committee as merely a formal pre-
liminary to the introduction of the Bill which the shipping
interest had drafted,^ under which Trade Unions, and even
Friendly Societies, would have been impossible. For the
inner history of this Committee we have to rely on Place's
voluminous memoranda, and Hume's brief notes to him.
According to these, the original intention was to call only a
few employers as witnesses, to exclude all testimony on the
other side, and promptly to report in favour of the repressive
measure already prepared. Place, himself an expert in
such tactics, met them by again supplying Hume daily with
detailed information which enabled him to cross-examine
the masters and expose their exaggerations. And, if Place's
account of the animus of the Committee and the Ministers
against himself be somewhat highly coloured, we have
ample evidence of the success with which he guided the
alarmed -Trade Unions to take effectual action in their own
defence. His friend John Gast, secretary to the London
Shipwrights, called for two delegates from each trade
in the metropolis, and formed a committee which kept
up a persistent agitation against any re-enactment of the
Combination Laws. Similar committees were formed
at Manchester and Glasgow by the cotton operatives; at
Sheffield by the cutlers, and at Newcastle by the seamen
and shipwrights. Petitions, the draft of which appears in
Place's manuscripts, poured in to the Select Committee and
to both Houses. If we are to believe Place, the passages
leading to the committee-room were carefully kept thronged
by crowds of workmen insisting on being examined to rebut
the accusations of the employers, and waylaying individual
members to whom they explained their grievances. All this
* This included a provision to forbid the subscription of any funds to a
trade or other association, unless some magistrate approved its objects
and became its treasurer.
Re-enactment 107
energy on the part of the Unions was, as Place observes, in
marked contrast with their apathy the- year before. The
workmen, though they had done nothing to gain their
freedom of association, were determined to maintain it.
Doherty, the leader of the Lancashire Cotton-spinners,
writing to Place in the heat of the agitation, declared that
any attempt at a re-enactment of the Combination Laws
would result in a widespread revolutionary movement.^
The nett result of the inquiry was, on the whole, satisfactory.
The Select Committee found themselves compelled to hear
a certain number of workmen witnesses, who testified to the
good results of the Act of the previous year. The ship-
owners' Bill was abandoned, and the House of Commons
was recommended to pass a measure which nominally
re-established the general common-law prohibition of
combinations, but specifically excepted from prosecution
associations for the purpose of regulating wages or hours
of labour. The master shipbuilders were furious at this
virtual defeat. The handbill is still extant which they
distributed at the doors of the House of Commons on the
day of the second reading of the emasculated Bill. 2 They
declared that its provisions were quite insufhcient to save
their industry from destruction. If Trade Unions were to
be allowed to exist at all, they demanded that these bodies
should be compelled to render full accounts of their expen-
diture to the justices in Quarter Sessions, and that any
diversion of monies raised for friendly society purposes
should be severely punished. They pleaded, moreover,
that at any rate all federal or combined action among trade
clubs should be prohibited. Place and Hume, on the other
hand, were afraid, and subsequent events proved with
what good grounds, that the narrow limits of the trade
combinations allowed by the Bill, and still more the vague
terms " molest " and " obstruct," which it contained,
would be used as weapons against Trade Unionism. The
Government, however, held to the draft of the Committee.
1 Place MSS. 27803—299. * Ibid. 27803—212.
io8 The Struggle for Existence
The shipbuilders secured nothing. Hume induced Ministers
to give way on some verbal points, and took three divisions
in vain protest against the measure. Place carried on the
agitation to the House of Lords, where Lord Rosslyn
extracted the concession of a right of appeal to Quarter
Sessions, which was afterwards to prove of some practical
value.
The Act of 1825 (6 Geo. IV. c. 129) ^ — which became
known among the manufacturers as " Peel's Act " — though
it fell short of the measure which Place and Hume had so
skilfully piloted through Parliament the year before, effected
a real emancipation. The right of collective bargaining,
involving the power to withhold labour from the market by
concerted action, was for the first time expressly established.
And although many struggles remained to be fought before
the legal freedom of Trade Unionism was fully secured, no
overt attempt has since been made to render illegal this
first condition of Trade Union action. ^
It is a suggestive feature of this, as of other great re-
forms, that the men whose faith in its principle, and whose
indefatigable industry and resolution carried it through,
were the only ones who proved altogether mistaken as to
its practical consequences. If we read the lesson of the
century aright, the manufacturer was not wholly wrong
when he protested that liberty of combination must make
the workers the ultimate authority in industry, althoiigh his
narrow fear as to the driving away of capital and commercial
skill and the reduction of the nation to a dead level of
anarchic pauperism were entirely contradicted by subse-
quent developments. And the workman, to whom liberty
to combine opened up vistas of indefinite advancement of
1 Home Office Papers, letter of January 3, 1832 (H.O. 40 — 30).
" It is pleasant to record that .some of the workmen expressed their
gratitude for Francis Place's indefatigable services. " Soon after the
procccdinf!;s in 1.S25 were closed," he writes, " the seamen of the Tyne and
Wear sent me a handsome silver vase, paid for by a penny-a-wcek sub-
scription ; and the cutlers of Sliellicld sent me an incomparable set of
knives and forks in a case" (Place MSS. 27798 — 66).
The Result
109
his class at the expense of his oppressors, was, we now see,
looking rightly forward, though he, too, greatly miscalcu-
lated the distance before him, and overlooked many arduous
stages of the journey. But what is to be said of the fore-
casts of Place and the Philosophic Radicals ? " Combina-
tions," writes Place to Sir Francis Burdett in 1825, " will
soon cease to exist. Men have been kept together for long
periods only by the oppressions of the laws ; these being
repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements
them into masses, and they will fall to pieces. All will be
as orderly as even a Quaker could desire. . . . He knows
nothing of the working people who can suppose that, when
left at liberty to act for themselves without being driven
into permanent associations by the oppression of the laws,
they will continue to contribute money for distant and
doubtful experiments, for uncertain and precarious benefits.
If let alone, combinations — excepting now and then, and
for particular purposes under pecuUar circumstances — will
cease to exist." ^
It is pleasant to feel that Place was right in regarding
the repeal as beneficial and worthy of his best efforts in
its support ; but in every less general respect he and his
aUies were as wrong as it was possible for them to be. The
first disappointment, however, came to the workmen. Over
and over again they had found their demands for higher
wages parried only by the employers' resort to the law, and
they now saw the way clear before them for an organised
attack upon their masters' profits. Trades which had not
yet enjoyed permanent combinations began to organise in
the expectation of raising their wages to the level of those
of their more fortunate brethren. The Sheffield shop-
assistants combined to petition for early closing.- The
cotton-weavers of Lancashire met in delegate meeting at
Manchester in August 1824 to estabhsh a permanent
organisation to prevent reductions in prices and to secure
^ June 25, 1825. Ibid. iT/gBi — 57.
2 Sheffield Iris, September 27, 1825.
no The Struggle for Existence
a uniform wage, the notice stating that it was by their
secret combinations that the tailors, joiners, and spinners
had succeeded in keeping up wages. ^ In the same month
the Manchester dyers turned out for an advance, and paraded
the streets, which they had placarded with their proposals. ^
The Glasgow calender-men struck for a regular twelve hours'
day, and carried their point. The success of the ship-
wrights on the north-east coast ^ induced the London ship-
wrights to convert their " Committee for conducting the
Business in the North " into the " Shipwrights' Provident
Union of the Port of London," which existed continuously
until its absorption in the twentieth century by the
national society dojninating the trade.
" Such is the rage for union societies," reports the
Sheffield Iris of July 12, 1825, " that the sea apprentices in
Sunderland have actually had regular meetings every day
last week on the moor, and have resolved not to go on board
their ships unless the owners will allow them tea and sugar."
Local trade clubs expanded, Uke the Manchester Steam-
Engine Makers' Society, into national organisations. In
other cases corresponding clubs developed into federal
bodies. The object in all these cases was the same. The
preamble to the first rules of the Friendly Society of Opera-
tive House Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain, which
was estabhshed by a delegate meeting in London in 1827,
states that, " for the amelioration of the evils attendant on
our trade, and the advancement of the rights and privileges
of labour," it was considered " absolutely necessary that a
firm compact of interests should exist between the whole of
the operative carpenters and joiners throughout the United
Kingdom of Great Britain." *
^ Handbill preaerved in Place MSS. 27803 — 255.
2 Manchester Guardian, August 7, 1824 ; see also On Combinations oj
Trades (1830).
3 This is expressly stated in the preamble to the rules adopted at the
meeting on August 16, 1824, and recorded in the first minufe-book.
* This society afterwards developed into the existing General Union
of Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain.
A Commercial Slump iii
Nor was it only in the multiplication of trade societies
that the expansion showed itself. A committee of delegates
from the London trades meeting during the summer of
1825 set on foot the Trades Newspaper and Mechanics'
Weekly Journal, a sevenpenny stamped paper, with the
motto, " They helped every one his neighbour, and every
one said to his brother, ' Be of good cheer.' " ^ A vigorous
attempt was made to promote Trade Union organisation
in all industries, and to bring to bear a body of instructed
working-class opinion upon the political situation of the
day. 2
The high hopes of which all this exultant activity was
the symptom were soon rudely dashed. The year 1825
closed with a financial panic and widespread commercial
disaster. The four years that followed were years of con-
traction and distress. Hundreds of thousands of workmen
in all trades lost their employment, and wages were reduced
all round. In many manufacturing districts the operatives
were kept from starvation only by public subscriptions.^
Strikes under these circumstances ended invariably in
disaster. A notable stand made by the Bradford wool-
combers and weavers in 1825 resulted in complete defeat
and the break-up of the Union.*
During the greater part of the following year all Lanca-
shire was convulsed by incessant strikes of coal-miners and
textile workers against the repeated reductions of wages to
^ Two rival journals, The Journeyman's and Artisan's London and
Provincial Chronicle, and The Mechanic's Newspaper and Trade Journal,
were also started, but soon expired.
2 The Trades Newspaper was managed by a Committee of eleven
delegates from different trades, of which John Gast was chairman, and was
edited, at first by Mr. Baines, son of the proprietor of the Leeds Mercury,
and afterwards by a Mr. Anderson. The Laws and Regulations of the
Trades Newspaper (1825, 12 pp.) are preserved in the Place MSS. 27803 — 414.
The issues from July 17, 1825, to its amalgamation with The Trades Free
Press in 1828, are in the British Museum.
^ ^^232,000 was raised by one committee alone between 1826 and 1829.
See Report of the Committee appointed at a Public Meeting at the City of
London Tavern. Mav 2, 1826, to relieve the Manufacturers, by W. H. Hyett,
1829.
* Wool and Wool-combing, by Burnley, p. 169.
112 The Struggle for Existence
which the employers resorted— strikes which were marred by
serious disorder, the destruction of many hundreds of looms,
and severe repression by the troops. ^
At Kidderminster, three years later, practically the whole
trade of the town was brought to a standstill by "the carpet-
weavers' six months' resistance to a reduction of 17 per
cent in their wages 2_a resistance in which the operatives
received the sympathy and support of many who did not
belong to their class. In the same year the silk-weavers of
London and other towns maintained an embittered resist-
ance to a further cut at wages.^ The emancipated com-
binations were no more able to resist reductions than the
secret ones had been, and in some instances the workmen
again resorted to violence and machine-breaking.
For a moment the repeal seemed, after all, to have done
nothing but prove the futiHty of mere sectional combina-
tion, and the working men turned back again from Trade
Union action to the larger aims and wider character of the
Radical and SociaHstic agitations of the time, with which,
from 1829 to 1842, the Trade Union Movement became
inextricably entangled. This is the phase which furnishes
the theme of the following chapter.
1 Home Office Papers, 40—20, 21, etc. ; Annual Register, 1826 pp 63
70, III, 128 ; Walpole's History of England, vol. ii. p. 141.
2 A Letter to the Carpet Manufacturers of Kidderminster, by the Rev
H. Price (1S28, 16 pp.) ; A Letter to the Rev. H. Price, upon the Tendency of
Certain Publications of his, by Oppidanus, 1828 ; and A Verbatim Report
of the Trial of the Rev. Humphrey Price upon a Criminal Information by the
Kidderminster Carpet Manufacturers for Alleged Infammatorv Publications
during the 2 urn-out of the Weavers, 1829.
3 Resolutions of the Meeting of Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers at
Spitalfields, April 16. i82g ; in Home Office Papers, 40—23 24 See for
this period, Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce in
Modern Tmies, 1903, pp. 759-762; and also The Skilled Labourer, bv
J. L. and B. Hammond, 1919, published too late for us to make use of it's
interesting descriptions of the principal trades.
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
[1829-1842]
So far we have been mainly concerned with societies formed
in particular trades, nearly always confined to particular
localities, and known as institutions, associations, trade
clubs, trade societies, unions, and union societies. We have
by anticipation applied the term Trade Union. to them in
its modern sense ; but in no case that we have discovered
did they call themselves so. It is in the leading articles of
the newspapers of 1830-4 that we first come upon references
to some great Power of Darkness vaguely described as " the
Trades Union." We find, moreover, that there was in that
day, as there has been repeatedly since, an Old Unionism
and a New Unionism, and that " the Trades Union " repre-
sented the New Unionism, and the trade club, or Trade
Union, as we have called it, the Old. The distinction be-
tween a Trade Union and a Trades Union is exactly that
which the names imply. A Trade Union is a combination
of the members of one trade ; a Trades Union is a combina-
tion of different trades. " The Trades Union," the bug-
bear of the Times in 1834, means the ideal at which the
Trades Unionists aimed : that is, a complete union of all
the workers in the country in a single national Trades
Union. The peculiar significance of Trades Union as dis-
tinguished from Trade Union must be carefully borne in
"3
114 ^^^ Revolutionary Period
mind throughout this chapter, as it has passed out of use
and occurs now only as a Uterary blunder. Our present
unions of workers in different though related trades are
usually called Amalgamations or Federations. But both
Amalgamations and Federations, being definitely limited
to similar or related and interdependent trades, are in idea
essentially Trade Unions. The distinctive connotation of
the term Trades Union was the ideal of complete solidarity
of all wage- workers in " One Big Union " — that is to say,
a single " universal " organisation. It is the attempt,
on the part of the Trade Union leaders, to form not only
national societies of particular trades, but also to include
»all manual workers in one comprehensive organisation,
that constitutes the New Unionism of 1829-34.^
We are not altogether without information as to the
genesis of the idea. The first attempt at a General Trades
tjnion of which we have any record is that of the " Phil-
anthropic Society " or " Philanthropic Hercules " of 1818.
This we hear of almost simultaneously in Manchester, the
Potteries and London, though it seems to have originated
in the first-named town. A meeting of workmen of various
trades, held at Manchester in August 1818, convinced of
the impotence of isolated. Trade Clubs, sought to establish
a society on a federal basis, each constituent trade raising
its own funds and separately moving for advances or
resisting reductions ; but pledged first to consult the com-
^ In a manuscript essay on the different forms of association, entitled
"Trades Unions condemned, Trade Clubs justified," Place gives us the
distinction between the two. " A trade society," he says, " that is, a
club consisting of the journeymen in any one trade which does not form
part of a union of several trades, which does not appoint delegates to
meet other delegates, is a very different thing from a Trades Union, even
though it may call itself a union. Trades Unions are those in which
several trades, or portions of several trades, in the same line of business
01* in different callings, are confederated by means of delegates." Place
often refers to this distinction between the Trade Clufi^, which were,
according to his view, " very valuable institutions," and the " Trades
Unions," or " associations of several or many trades in one combination,"
which he regarded as " very mischievous associations." Wilham Lovett,
too, watching the same transformation, makes, in a letter published in
the Poor Man's Guardian of August 30, 1834, exactly the same distinction.
IL
" One Big Union " 115
mittee and the other trades, and promised the support
of all, both in approved trade movements and in case of
legal prosecution or oppression. A committee of eleven
was to be chosen by ballot, one-third retiring monthly by
rotation ; and was to be assisted by a similar local organi-
sation in each town.^ How far the " General Union," as
the " Philanthropic Society " seems also to have been called,
got under way in Lancashire or Staffordshire remains
uncertain ; but in London the idea was taken up by one
of the ablest Trade Unionists of the time — the shipwright
John Gast, whom we have already mentioned as an ally of
Francis Place, who became president and called upon " the
general body of mechanics " to subscribe a penny per
week to a central fund for the defence of their common
interests.^
Whether anything came of the attempts at a General
Union in 1818-19 we have not discovered, but in all proba-
bihty the project immediately failed. Seven years later
a similar effort met with no greater success. " In 1826,"
as we incidentally learn from a subsequent Labour journal,^
" a Trades Union was formed in Manchester, which extended
shghtly to some of the surrounding districts, and embraced
several trades in each ; but it expired before it was so much
as known to a large majority of the operatives in the neigh-
•bourhood."
\\niat was aimed at is clear enough. It was being
recommended to the workmen by some of their intellectual
advisers. An able pamphlet of 1827 tells them that
" Against the competition of the underpaid of surrounding
trades, the ready remedy is a centra.1 union of all the general
^ See the reports to the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers, 42 — 179,
180, 181, 182) ; The Town Labourer (by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917),
pp. 306-11.
2 See the " Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules, for the Mutual
Support of the Labouring Mechanics," dated December 24, 181 8, which
Gast contributed to the Gorgon. Cast's prehminary address appears in
the issue for December 5, 1818, and in that of January 29, 1819, the
society is described as established (Place MSS. 27899 — 143).
' The Herald of the Rights of Industry (Manchester, April 5, 1834).
ii6 The Revolutionary Period
unions of all the trades of the country. The remuneration
of all the different branches of artisans and mechanics in
the country might then be fixed at those rates which would
leave such an equalised remuneration to all as would take
away any temptation from those in one branch to transfer
their skill in order to undersell the labour of the well-
remunerated in another branch : the Central Union fund
being always ready to assist the unemployed in any par-
ticular branch, when their own local and general funds
were exhausted ; provided always their claims to support
were by the Central Union deemed to be just." ^
Experience seems to show that national organisation
of particular trades must precede the formation of any
General Trades Union ; and it was in this way that the
project now took form. In 1829 we see renewed attempts
at national organisation, in which the Lancashire and
Yorkshire textile and building operatives were pioneers.
The year 1829, closing the long depression of trade which
began in the autumn of 1825, after the repeal of the Com-
bination Laws, witnessed the establishment of important
national Unions in both industries, but that of the Cotton-
spinners claims precedence in respect of its more rapid
development.
The Cotton-spinners' trade clubs of Lancashire date
apparently from 1792, and they spread, within a genera-
tion, to thirty or forty towns, remaining always strictly
local organisations. In the early years of the nineteenth
century attempts had been made by the Glasgow spinners
to unite the Lancashire and Scottish organisations in a
national association ; but these attempts had not resulted
in more than temporary alliances in particular emergencies.
The rapid improvement of spinning machinery, and the
enterprise of the Lancashire millowners, were, at the date
of the repeal of the Combination Laws, shifting the centre
1 Labour Rewarded : The Claims of Labour and Capital : How to secure to
Labour the Whole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes [William
Thompson], 1827 ; see The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
John Doherty iiy
of the trade from Glasgow to Manchester ; and it was the
Lancashire Cotton-spinners who now took the lead in trade
matters. The failure of a disastrous six months' strike
in 1829 at Hyde, near Manchester, led to the conviction
that no local Union could succeed against a combination
of employers ; and the spinners' societies of England,
Scotland, and Ireland were therefore invited to send delegates
to a conference to be held at Ramsay, in the Isle of Man,
in the month of December 1829.
This delegate meeting, of which there is an excellent
report,^ lasted for nearly a week. The proceedings were of
a remarkably temperate character, the discussions turning
chiefly on the relative advantages of one supreme executive
to be established at Manchester, and three co-equal national
executives for England, Scotland, and Ireland. No secrecy
was attempted. John Doherty, ^ secretary and leader of
^ A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting of Cotton-spinners at Ramsay,
etc. (Manchester, 1829, 56 pages) ; Copy of Resolutions of the Delegates
from the Operative Cotton-spinners who met at the Isle of Man (Manchester,
1830), in Home Office Papers, 40 — 27.
^ John Dohert:3^ described by Place as a somewhat hot-headed Roman
CathoUc — really one of the acutest thinkers and stoutest leaders among
the workmen of his time — was born in Ireland in 1 799, and went to work
in a cotton-mill at Lame, Co. Antrim, at the age of ten. In 1816 he
migrated to Manchester, where he quickly became one of the leading
Trade Unionists, and secretary to the local Cotton-spinners' Society. We
find him, for instance, taking a prominent part in the agitation against
the proposed re-enactment of the Combination Laws in 1825. Whether
he was concerned in the Philanthropic Society or General Union of 1818
or 1826 we do not know. In 1829 he organised the great strike of the
Hyde spinners against a reduction of rates, and became, as described in
the text, successively General Secretary to the Federation of Spinners'
Societies, and to the National Association for the Protection of Labour,
in which office he is reported, probably inaccurately, to have received the
then enormous salary of /600 a j'ear. We naturallj- find him the object
of great suspicion by the Government, but no charge seems ever to have
been brought against him (Home Office Papers, 40 — 26, 27). The
articles in the Voice of the People and the Poor Man's Advocate, which are
evidently from his pen, show him to have been a man of \\'ide informa-
tion, great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching aims. His idea was that
all the local and district Unions were to be federated in a national organisa-
tion for the sole purpose of deahng with trade matters, and that they should
also be federated in a National Association for obtaining political reforms.
In 1832, during the Reform crisis. Place describes him as advising the
working classes to use the occasion for a social revolution. He sub-
ii8 The Revolutionary Period
the Manchester Cotton-spinners, advocated a central execu-
tive ; while Thomas Foster (a man of independent means
who attended the conference at his own expense) favoured
a scheme of home rule. Eventually a " Grand General
Union of the United Kingdom " was established, subject
to an annual delegate meeting and three national com-
mittees. The union was to include all male spinners and
piecers, the women and girls being urged to form separate
organisations, which were to receive all the aid of the whole
confederation in supporting them to obtain " men's prices."
The union was to promote local action for a further legis-
lative restriction of the hours of labour, to apply to all
persons under 21 years of age. Its income consisted of a
contribution of a penny per week per member, to be levied
in addition to the contribution to the local society. Doherty
was general secretary, and Foster and a certain Patrick
McGowan were appointed to organise the spinners through-
out the United Kingdom.
The Boroughreeve and Constables of Manchester, on
May 26, 1830, wrote in alarm to Sir Robert Peel : " The
combination of workmen, long acknowledged a great evil,
and one most difficult to counteract, has recently assumed
so formidable and systematic a shape in this district that
we feel it our duty to lay before you some of its most alarming
features. ... A committee of delegates from the operative
spinners of the three Kingdoms have estabHshed an annual
assembly in the Isle of Man to direct the proceedings of the
general body towards their employers, the orders for which
they promulgate to their respective districts and sub-
committees. To these orders the most implicit deference
sequently acted as secretary to an association of operatives and masters
established to enforce the Factory Acts, and was one of Lord Shaftesbury's
most strenuous supporters. In 1838, when he had become a printer and
bookseller in Manchester, he gave evidence before the Select Committee
on Combinations of Workmen, in which he described the spinners' organisa-
tions and strikes. There is a pamphlet by him in the Goldsmiths' Library
at the University of London, entitled A Letter to the Members of the National
Association jor the Protection of Labour (Manchester, 1831).
The Cotton-spinners 119
is shown ; and a weekly levy or rent of one penny per head
on each operative is cheerfully paid. This produces a large
sum, and is a powerful engine, and principally to support
those who have turned out against their employers,
agreeable to the orders of the committee, at the rate
of ten shillings per week for each person. The plan of
a general tmnout having been found to be impohtic,
they have employed it in detail, against particular
individuals or districts, who, attacked thus singly, are
frequently compelled to submit to their terms rather
than to the ruin which would ensue to many by allowing
their machinery (in which their whole capital is invested)
to stand idle." ^
Whether this Cotton-spinners' Federation, as we should
call it, became really representative of the three kingdoms
does not appear. A second general delegate meeting was
held at Manchester in December 1830, which intervened
in the great spinners' strike then in progress at Ashton-
under-Lyne. At this conference the constitution of 1829
was re-enacted with some alterations. The three national
executives were apparently replaced by an executive council
of three members elected by the Manchester Society, to be
^reinforced at its monthly meetings by two delegates chosen
in turn by each of the neighbouring districts. A general
delegate meeting seems also to have been held, attended by
one delegate from each of the couple of scores of towns in
which there were local clubs. ^ Foster was appointed general
secretary ; and a committee was ordered to draw up a
general list of prices, for which purpose one member in each
mill was directed to send up a copy of the Hst by which he
was paid. Although another delegate meeting of this
" Grand General Union " was fixed for Whit Monday 1831
at Liverpool, no further record of its existence can be traced.
It is probable that the attempt to include Scotland and
Ireland proved a failure, and that the union had dwindled
^ Home Ofi&ce Papers, 40 — 27.
^ Ibid., December 3, 1830, 40 — 26.
120 The Revolutionary Period
into a federation of Lancashire societies, mainly preoccu-
pied in securing a legislative restriction of the hours of
labour. 1
But the National Union of Cotton-spinners prepared
the way for the more ambitious project of the Trades
Union. Doherty, who seems to have resigned his official
connection with the Cotton-spinners' Union, conceived the
idea of a National Association, not of one trade alone, but
of all classes of wage-earners. Already in May 1829 we
find him, as Secretary of the Manchester Cotton-spinners,
writing to acknowledge a gift of ten pounds from the Liver-
pool Sailmakers, and expressing " a hope that our joint
efforts may eventually lead to a Grand General Union of
all trades throughout the United Kingdom," ^ At his
instigation a meeting of delegates from twenty organised
trades was held at Manchester in February 1830, which
ended in the establishment, five months later, of the
National Association for the Protection of Labour. The
express object of this society was to resist reductions, but
not to strike for advances. In an eloquent address to
working men of all trades, the new Association appealed to
them to unite for their own protection and in order to
mainta.in " the harmony of society " which is destroyed by
their subjection. How is it, the Association asks, that
whilst everything else increases — knowledge, wealth, ci\dl
and religious liberty, churches, madhouses, and prisons — the
circumstances of the working man become ever worse ?
"He, the sole producer of food and raiment, is, it appears,
destined to sink whilst others rise." To prevent this evil
^ Foster died in 1831, and McGowan settled at Glasgow. "Almost
every spinning district." writes the Poor Man's Advocate of June 23, 1832,
" of any consequence, was enrolled in the Union. The power of the
Union, of course, increased with its members, and a number of the worst-
paying employers were compelled to advance the wages of the spinners to
something like the standard rate. . . . The Union, however, which Mr.
McGowan had mainly contributed to mature, has since, from distrust or
weariness, sunk into comparative insignificance."
- The letter is preserved in the MS. " Contribution Book " of the
Liverpool Sailmakers' Fiiendly Association, established 1817.
The National Association. I2i
the Association is formed.^ Its constitution appears to
have been largely borrowed from that of the contemporary
Cotton-spinners, which it resembled in being a combination,
not of directly enlisted individuals, but of existing separate
societies, each of which paid an entrance fee of a pound,
together with a shilHng for each of its members, and con-
tributed at the rate of a penny per week per head of its
membership. Doherty was the first secretary, and the
Association appears very soon to have enrolled about 150
separate Unions, mostly in Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby,
Nottingham, and Leicester. The trades which joined were
mainly connected with the various textile industries — the
cotton-spinners, hosiery-workers, caUco-printers, and silk-
weavers taking a leading part. The Association also
included numerous societies of mechanics, moulders, black-
smiths, and many miscellaneous trades. The building
trades were scarcely represented — a fact to be accounted
for by the contemporary existence of the Builders' Union
hereafter described. The list ^ of the receipts of the Associa-
tion for the first nine months of its existence includes pay-
ments amounting to £1866, a sum which indicates a member-
ship of between 10,000 and 20.000, spread over the five
counties already mentioned. A vigorous propaganda was
carried on throughout the northern and midland counties
by its officials, who succeeded in estabhshing a weekly
paper, the United Trades Co-operative Journal, which was
presently brought to an end by the intervention of the
Commissioners of Stamps, who insisted on each number
bearing a fourpenny stamp.^ Undeterred by this failure,
the committee undertook the more serious task of starting
a sevenpenny stamped weekly, and requested Francis Place
^ Address of the National Association for the Protection of Labour to
the Workmen of the United Kingdom (4 pp. 1830), in Home Office Papers,
40 — 27.
2 Given as Appendix to the pamphlet On Combination of Trades
(1830). Compare Wade's History of the Middle and Working Classes
(1834), P- 277.
^ Thirty-one numbers, extending from March 6 to October 2, 1830,
are in the Manchester Pubhc Library (620 B).
122 The Revolutionary Period
to become the treasurer of an accumulated fund. " The
subscription," writes Place to John Cam Hobhouse, Decem-
ber 5, 1830, " extends from Birmingham to the Clyde ; the
committee sits at Manchester ; and the money collected
amounts to about £3000, and will, they tell me, shortly be
as much as ;£5000, with which sum, when raised, they pro-
pose to commence a, weekly newspaper to be called the
Voice 0/ the People." Accordingly in January 1831 appeared
the first number of what proved to be an excellent weekly
journal, the object of which was declared to be " to unite
the productive classes of the community in one common
bond of union." Besides full weekly reports of the com-
mittee meetings of the National Association at Manchester
and Nottingham, tliis newspaper, ably edited by John
Doherty, gave great attention to Radical poHtics,- including
the Repeal of the Union with Ireland, and the progress of
revolution on the Continent.^
From the reports published in the Voice of the People
we gather that the first important action of the Association
was in connection with tlie almost continuous strikes of the
cotton-spinners at Ashton-under-Lyne, which flamed up
into a sustained conflict on a large scale, during which
Ashton, a young millowner, was murdered by some unknown
person in the winter of 1830-31, in resistance to a new Ust
of prices arbitrarily imposed by the Association of Master
Spinners in Ashton, Dukinficld, and Stalybridge.^ Con-
siderable sums were raised by way of levy for the support
of the strike, the Nottingham trades subscribing liberally.
But the Association soon experienced a check. In Feb-
ruary 1831 a new secretary decamped with £100. Tliis
led a delegate meeting at Nottingham, in April 1831, to
decree that each Union should retain in hand the money
contributed by its own members. But the usual failings
of unions of various trades quickly showed themselves.
^ The numbers from January to September 1831 are in the British
Museum. See Place's letter in \Vcst»\i>i<tfr Review (1831), p. 243.
• Home Office Papers. 40 — 26, 27.
The Voice of the People 123
The refusal of the Lancashire branches to support the
great Nottingham strike which immediately ensued led
to the defection of the Nottingham members. Neverthe-
less the Association was spreading over new ground. We
hear of delegates from Lancashire inducing thousands of
colHers in Derbyshire to join, whilst other trades, and even
the agricultural labourers, were talking about it.^ At the end
of April a delegate meeting at Bolton, representing nine
thousand coalminers of Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Cheshire,
and Wales, resolved to join. The Belfast trades applied
for affihation. In Leeds nine thousand members were
enrolled, chiefly among the woollen-workers. Missionaries
were sent to organise the Staffordshire potters ; and a
National Potters' Union, extending throughout the country,
was estabhshed and affiliated. All this activity lends a
certain credibiUty to the assertion, made in various quarters,
that the Association numbered one hundred thousand
members, and that the Voice of the People, published at
yd. weekly, enjoyed the then enormous circulation of thirty
thousand.
Here at last we have substance given to the formidable
idea of " the Trades Union." It was soon worked up by
the newspapers to a pitch at which it alarmed the employers,
dismally excited the imaginations of the middle class, and
compelled the attention of the Government. But there
was no cause for apprehension. Lack of funds made the
Association little more than a name. Practically no trade
action is reported in such numbers of its organ as are still
extant. The business of the Manchester Committee seems
to have been confined to the promotion of the " Short Time
Bill." On April 23, 1831, at the general meeting of the
Association, then designated the Lancashire Trades Unions,
it was resolved to prepare petitions in favour of extending
this measure to aU trades and all classes of workers. Active
support was given in the meantime to Mr. Sadler's Factory
Bill. Towards the end of the year we suddenly lose all
^ Home Ofi&ce Papers, April 8, 1831, 44 — 25.
124 ^^^^ Revolutionary Period
trace of the National Association for the Protection of
Labour, as far as Manchester is concerned. " After it had
extended about a hundred miles round this town," writes
a working-class newspaper of 1832, "a fatality came upon
it that almost threatened its extinction. . . . But though it
declined in Manchester it spread and flourished in other
places ; and we rejoice to say that the resolute example set
by Yorkshire and other places is likely once more to revive
the drooping energies of those trades who had the honour
of originating and establishing the Association." ^
What the fatality was that extinguished the Association in
Manchester is not stated ; but Doherty, to whose organising
ability its initial success had been due, evidently quarrelled
with the executive committee, and the Voice of the People
ceased to appear. In its place we find Doherty issuing,
from January 1832, the Poor Man's Advocate, and vainly
striving, in face of the " spirit " of " jealousy and faction,"
to build up the Yorkshire branches of the Association into
a national organisation, with its headquarters in London.
After the middle of 1832 we hear no more, either of the
Association itself or of Doherty 's more ambitious projects
concerning it.^
The place of the National Association was soon filled
by other contemporary general trade societies, of which
the first and most important was the Builders' Union, or
^ Union Pilot and Co-operative Intelligencer, March 24, 1832 (Man-
chester Public Library, 640 E).
^ Meanwhile the coalminers of Northumberland and Durham, under
the leadership of " Tommy Hepburn," an organiser of remarkable ability,
had formed their first strong Union in 1830, which for two years kept
the two counties in a state of excitement. Strikes and riotings in 1831
and 1832 caused the troops to be called out : marines were sent from
Portsmouth, and squadrons of cavalry scoured the country. After six
months' struggle in 1832 the Union collapsed, and the men submitted.
See Home Office Papers for these years, 40 — 31, 32, &c. ; Sykes' Local
Records of Norihumbefland, &c., vol. ii. pp. 293, 353 ; Fynes' Miners of
Northumberland and Durham (Blyth, 1873), chaps, iv. v. vi. ; An Earnest
Address and Urgent Appeal to the People of England in behalf of the Oppressed
and Suffering Pitmen of the Counties of Northumberland and Durham (by
W. Scott, Newcastle, 1831) ; History and Description of Fossil Fuel, etc.
(by John Holland, 1835), pp. 298-304.
The Builders Union 125
the General Trades Union, as it was sometimes termed.
It consisted of the separate organisations of the seven
building trades, viz. joiners, masons, bricklayers, plasterers,
plumbers, painters, and builders' labourers, and is, so far
as we know, the solitary example, prior to the present
century, in the history of those trades of a federal union
embracing all classes of building operatives, and purporting
to extend over the whole country.^
The Grand Rules of the Builders' Union set forth an
elaborate constitution in which it was attempted to com-
bine a local and trade autonomy of separate lodges with a
centralised authority for defensive and aggressive purposes.
The rules inform us that " the object of this society shall
be to advance and equahse the price of labour in every
branch of the trade we admit into this society." Each
lodge shall be " governed by its own password and sign,
masons to themselves, and joiners to themselves, and so
on ; " and it is ordered that " no lodge be opened by any
^ It is not clear whether this scheme was initiated by carpenters or
masons. The carpenters and joiners are distinguished among the build-
ing trades for the antiquity of their local trade clubs, which are known
to have existed in London as far back as 1799. A national organisation
was established in London in July 1827, called the Friendly Society of
Operative Carpenters and Joiners, which still survives under the title of
the " General Union." MS. records in the of&ce of the latter show that
this federation had 938 members in 1832, rising to 3691 in 1833, and to
6774 in 1834, a total not paralleled until 1865. This rapid increase
marks the general upheaval of these years. But this Society did not
throw in its lot with the Builders' Union until 1833. On the other hand,
the existing Operative Stonemasons' Friendly Society, which dates its
separate existence from 1834, but which certainly existed in some form
from 1832, has among its archives what appear to be the original MS.
rules and initiation rites of its predecessor, the Builders' Union ; and in
these documents the masons figure as the foremost members. Moreover,
these rules and rites closely resemble those of contemporary unions among
the Yorkshire woollen-workers ; and an independent tradition fixes the
parent lodge of the Masons' Society at the great woollen centre of Hudders-
field, whereas the Friendly Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in
London, had its headquarters at Leicester. But however this may be,
the constitution and ceremonies described in these documents owe their
significance to the fact that they are nearly identical with those adopted
b}' many of the national Unions of the period, and were largely adopted
by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834.
126 The Revolutionary Period
other lodge that is not the same trade of that lodge that
opens them, that masons open masons, and joiners open
joiners, and so on ; " moreover, " no other member [is] to
visit a lodge that is not the same trade unless he is par-
ticularly requested." Each trade had its own bye-laws ;
but these were subject to the general rules adopted at an
annual delegate meeting. This annual conference of the
" Grand Lodge Delegates," better known as the " Builders'
Parliament," consisted of one representative of each lodge,
and was the supreme legislative authority, altering rules,
deciding on general questions of policy, and electing the pre-
sident and other officials. The local lodges, though directly
represented at the annual meetings, had had apparently
little connection in the interim with the seat of govern-
ment. The society was divided into geographical dis-
tricts, the lodges in each district sending delegates to
quarterly district meetings, which elected a grand master,
deputy grand master, and corresponding secretary for the
district, and decided which should be the " divisional
lodge," or district executive centre. These divisional
lodges or provincial centres were, according to* the rules,
to serve in turn as the grand lodge or executive centre for
the whole society. Whether the members of the general
committee were chosen by the general lodge or by the whole
society is not clear ; but they formed, wdth the president
and general corresponding secretary, the national execu-
tive. The expenses of this executive and of the annual
delegate meeting were levied on the whole society, each
lodge sending monthly returns of its members and a
summary of its finances to the general secretary. The
main business of the national executive was to determine
the trade policy of the Associations, and to grant or with-
hold permission to strike. As no mention is made of
friendly benefits, we may conclude that the Builders'
Union, like most of the national or general Unions of this
militant time, confined itself exclusively to defending its
members against their employers.
Trade Union Ritual 127
The operative builders did not rest content with an
elaborate constitution and code. There was also a ritual.
The Stonemasons' Society has preserved among its records
a MS. cop3^ of a " Making Parts Book," ordered to be
used by all lodges of the Builders' Union on the admission
of members. Under the Combination Laws oaths of
secrecy and obedience were customary in the more secret
and turbulent Trade Unions, notably that of the Glasgow
Cotton-spinners and the Northumberland Miners. The
custom survived the repeal ; and admission to the Builders'
Union involved a lengthy ceremony conducted by the
officers of the lodge — the " outside and inside tylers,"
the " warden," the " president," '* secretary," and " prin-
cipal conductor " — and taken part in by the candidates
and the members of the lodge. Besides the opening prayer,
and religious hymns sung at intervals, these " initiation
parts " consisted of questions and responses by the dramatis
personcB in quaint doggerel, and were brought to a close
by the new members taking a solemn oath of loyalty and
secrecy. Officers clothed in surplices, inner chambers
into which the candidates were admitted blindfolded, a
skeleton, drawn sword, battle-axes, and other mystic
" properties " enhanced the sensational solemnity of this
fantastic performance.^ Ceremonies of this kind, including
1 A similar ritual is printed in Character. Objects, and Effects of Trades
Unions (1834), as used by the Woolcombers' Union. Probably the Builders'
Union copied their ritual from some union of woollen-workers. The
Stonemasons' MS. contains, hke the copy printed in this pamphlet, a
solemn reference to " King Edward the Third," who was regarded as the
great benefactor of the EngUsh wool trade, but whose connection with
the biiilding trade is not obVious. In a later printed edition of The
Initiating Parts of the Friendly Society of Operative Masons, dated Birming-
ham, 1834, his name is omitted, and that of Solomon substituted, ap-
parently in memory of the Freemasons' assumed origin at the building
of the Temple at Jerusalem.
The actual origin of this initiation ceremony is not certainly known
John Tester, who had been a leader of the Bradford Woolcombers iu
1825, afterwards turned against the Unions, and pubUshed. in the Leeds
Mercury of June and July 1834, a series of letters denouncing the Leeds
Clothiers' Union. In these he states that " the mode of initiation was the
same as practised for years before by the flannel-weavers of Rochdale,
with a party of whom the thing, in the shape it then wore, had at first
128 The Revolutionary Period
what were described to the Home Office as " oaths of a most
execrable nature," ^ were adopted by all the national and
general Unions of the time : thus we find items for " washing
surpHces " appearing in the accounts of various lodges of
contemporary societies. Although in the majority of
cases the ritual was no doubt as harmless as that of the
Freemasons or the Oddfellows, yet the excitement and
sensation of the proceedings may have predisposed light-
headed fanatical members, in times of industrial conflict,
to violent acts in the interest of the Association. At all
events, the references to its mock terrors in the capitalist
press seem to have effectually scared the governing classes.
The first years of the Builders' Union, apparently, were
devoted to organisation. During 1832 it rapidly spread
through the Lancashire and Midland towns ; and at the
beginning of the following year a combined attack was
made upon the Liverpool employers. The ostensible
grievance of the men was the interference of the " con-
tractor," who, supplanting the master mason, master
carpenter, etc., undertook the management of ^11 building
operations. A placard issued by the Liverpool Painters
announces that they have joined " the General Union of
the Artisans employed in the process of building," in order
to put down " that baneful, unjust, and ruinous system
originated. . . . A great part of the ceremony, . . . particularly the death
scene, was taken from the ceremonial of one division of the Oddfellows,
. . . who were flannel-weavers at Rochdale, in Lancashire ; and all that
could be well turned from the rules and. lectures of one society into the
regulations of the others was so turned, with .some trifling verbal altera-
tions." In another letter he says that the writer of the " lecture book "
was one Mark VVarde. Tester is not implicitly to be believed, but it
seems probable that the regalia, doggerel rhymes, and mystic rites of the
unions of this time were copied from those of an Oddfellows' Lodge, with
some recollections of Freemasonry. In his Mutual Thrijt (1891), the
Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson describes (p. 14) the initiation ceremony of the
" Patriotic Oddfellows," a society which merged in the present " Grand
United Qrder of Oddfellows " before the close of the century. The cere-
mony so described corresponds in many characteristic details with that
of the Trades Unions. All the older friendly society " Orders " imposed
an oath, and were consequently unlawful.
* Home Office Papers, December 29, 183J, ^q — 31.
Union Demands 129
of monopolising the hard-earned profits of another man's
business, called ' contracting.' " Naturally, the little
masters were not friendly to the contracting system ;
and most of them agreed with the men's demand that
its introduction should be resisted. Encouraged by this
support, the several branches of the building trade in
Liverpool simultaneously sent in identical claims for a
uniform rate of wages for each class of operatives, a limi-
tation of apprentices, the prohibition of machinery and
piecework, and other requirements special to each branch
of the trade: These demands were communicated to the
employers in letters couched in dictatorial and even insult-
ing terms, and were coupled with a claim to be paid wages
for any time they might lose by striking to enforce their
orders. " We consider," said one of these letters, " that
as you have not treated our rules with that deference you
ought to have done, we consider you highly culpable and
deserving of being severely chastised." And "further,"
says another, " that each and every one in such strike
shall be paid by you the sum of four shillings per day for
every day you refuse to comply." ^
^ At Birmingham, when the builders' strike presently extended to
that town, the following was the manifesto drawn up for adoption by the
Builders' Union, for presentation to the leading building contractor who
had just undertaken to erect the new grammar-school. (No record of
its adoption and presentation has been found.) " We, the delegates of
the several , Lodges of the Building Trades, elected for the purpose of
correcting the abuses which have crept into the modes of undertaking
and transacting business, do hereby give you notice that you will receive
no assistance from the workingmen in any of our bodies to enable you to
fulfil an engagement which we understand you have entered into with
the Governors of the Free Grammar School to erect a new school in New
Street, unless you comply with the following conditions :
" Aware that it is our labour alone that can carry into effect what
you have undertaken, we cannot but view ourselves as parties to your
engagement, if that engagement is ever fulfilled ; and as you had no
authority from us to make such an engagement, nor had you any legiti-
mate right to barter our labour at prices fixed by yourself, we call upon
you to exhibit to our several bodies your detailed estimates of quantities
and prices at which you have taken the work ; and we call upon you to
arrange with us a fixed percentage of profit for your own services in
conducting the building, and in finding the material on which our labour
is 'to be applied.
"Should we find upon examination that you have fixed equitable
F
130 The Revolutionary Period
This sort of language brought the employers of all
classes into line. At a meeting held in June 1833 they
decided not only to refuse all the men's demands, but to
make a "deliberate attempt to extinguish the Union. For
this purpose they publicly declared that henceforth no man
need apply for work unless he was prepared to sign a formal
renunciation of the Trades Union and all its works. The
insistence on this formal renunciation, henceforth to be
famous in Trade Union records as the " presentation of
the document," exasperated the Builders' Union. The
Liverpool demands were repeated in Manchester, where
the employers adopted the same tactics as at Liverpool.^
In the very heat of the battle (September 1833) the
Builders' Union held its annual delegate meeting at Man-
chester. It lasted six days ; cost, it is said, over ;^30oo ;
and was attended by two hundred and seventy delegates,
representing thirty thousand operatives. This session of
the " Builders' Parliament " attracted universal attention.
Robert Owen addressed the Conference at great length,
confiding to it his " great secret " " that labour is the
source of all wealth," and that wealth can be retained in
the hands of the producers by a universal compact among
the productive classes. It was decided, perhaps under his
influence, to build central offices at Birmingham, which
should also serve as an educational estabUshment. The
design for this " Builders' Gild Hall," as it was termed,
was made by Hansom, an architect who, as an enthusiastic
disciple of Owen, threw himself heartily into the strike
prices which will not only remunerate you for your superintendence but
us for our toil, we have no objections upon a clear understanding to become
partners to the contract, and will see you through it, after your haWng
entered yourself a member of our body, and after your having been duly
elected to occupy the oltice you have assumed " [Robert Owen : A Bio-
graphy, by I'^rank Podmore, 1906, vol. ii. p. 442-4).
^ An Impartial Statement of the Proceedings of the Members of the Trades
Union Societies, and of the Steps taken in consequence by the Master Traders
of Liverpool (Liverpciul, 1833) ; Remarks on the Nature and Probable
Termination of the Struggle now existing between the Master and Journey-
man Builders (Manchester, 1833) ; Times, June 27, 1833.
The Gild of Builders 131
that was proceeding also in this town. It included, on
paper, a lecture-hall and various schoolrooms for the chil-
dren of members. The foundation-stone was laid with great
ceremony on December 5, 1833, when the Birmingham
trades marched in procession to the site, and enthusiastic
speeches were made.^
We learn from the Pioneer, or Trades Union Magazine
(an unstamped penny weekly newspaper published at first
at Birmingham, at that time the organ of the Builders'
Union 2), the ardent faith and the vast pretensions of these
New Unionists. " A union founded on right and just
principles," wrote the editor in the first number, " is all
that is now required to put poverty and the fear of it for
ever out of society." "The vaunted power of capital will
now be put to the test : we shall soon discover its worthless-
ness when deprived of your labour. Labour prolific of wealth
will readily command the purchase of the soil ; and at a
very early period we shall find the idle possessor compelled
to ask of you to release him from his worthless holding."
Elaborate plans were propounded for the undertaking of
all the building of the country by a Grand National Gild of
Builders : each lodge to elect a foreman ; and the foremen
to elect a general superintendent. The disappointment of
these high hopes was rude and rapid. The Lancashire
societies demurred to the centrahsation which had been
voted by the delegate meeting in September at the instiga-
tion of the Midland societies. Two great strikes at Liver-
pool and Manchester ended towards the close of the year
in total failure. The Builders' Gild Hall was abandoned ; ^
and the Pioneer moved to London, where it became the
organ of another body, the Grand National Consolidated
^ Pioneer, December 7, 1833 ; History of Birmingham, by W. Hutton
(Birmingham, 1835), p. 87.
* It was edited by James Morrison, an enthusiastic Owenite, who
died, worn out, in 1835 {Beer's History of British Socialism, 1919, p.
328).
' It was eventually finished by the landlord, and still exists as a
metal warehouse in Shadwell Street.
132 The Revolutionary Period
Trades Union, with which the south country and metro-
politan branches of the building trade had already pre-
ferred to affiliate themselves. Nevertheless the Builders*
Union retained its hold upon the northern counties during
the early months of 1834, and held another " parliament "
at Birmingham in April, at which Scotch and Irish repre-
sentatives were present,^
The aggressive activity and rapid growth of the
Builders' Union during 1832-33 had been only a part of
a general upheaval in labour organisation. The Cotton-
spinners had recovered from the failure of the Ashton strike
(1830-31) by the autumn of 1833, when we find Doherty
prosecuting with his usual vigour the agitation for an
eight hours day which had been set on foot by his Society
for National Regeneration. " The plan is," writes J.
Fielden (M.P. for Oldham) to WiUiam Cobbett, " that
about the ist March next, the day the said Bill (now Act)
limits the time of work for children under eleven years of
age to eight hours a day, those above that age, both grown
persons and adults, should insist on eight hours a day
being the maximum of time for them to labour ; and their
present weekly wages for sixty-nine hours a week to be the
minimum weekly wages for forty-eight hours a week after
that time " ; and he proceeds to explain that the Cotton-
spinners had adopted this idea of securing shorter hours
by a strike rather than by legislation on Lord Althorpe's
suggestion that they should " make a short-time bill- for
themselves." ^ Fielden and Robert Owen served, with
Doherty, on the committee of this society, which included
a few employers. The Lancashire textile trades followed
the lead of the Cotton-spinners, and prepared for a " uni-
* In May 1834 an informer offered to supply the Home Secretary
with full particulars of its organisation, leading mera.bers and their
activities, for two sums of £^0 each (Home Office Papers, 40 — 32).
^ Letters to Cobbett's Weekly Register, reprinted in the Pioneer,
December 21, 1833. See also Home Office Papers, 40 — 32 ; and the
Crisis for November and December 1833. The Voice of the West Riding,
an unstamped weekly, June and July 1833, was devoted to this agitation
in the Yorkshire textile industrj' (see Home Office Papers, 40 — 31).
The ''Manufacturers Bond" 133
versal " strike. Meanwhile their Yorkshire brethren were
already engaged in an embittered struggle with their
employers. The Leeds Clothiers' Union, estabhshed about
1831, and apparently one of the constituent societies of
the National Association for the Protection of Labour,
bore a striking resemblance to the Builders' Union, not
only in ceremonial and constitution, but also in its policy
and history.! In the spring of 1833 it made a series of
attacks on particular establishments with the double aim
of forcing all the workers to join the Union and of obtaining
a uniform scale of prices. These demands were met with
the usual weapon. The employers entered into what was
called " the Manufacturers' Bond," by which they bound
themselves under penalty to refuse employment to all
members of the Union. The men indignantly refused to
abandon the society ; and a lock-out ensued which lasted
some months, and was the occasion of repeated leading
articles in the Times. ^
. The Potters' Union (also established by Doherty in
1830) numbered, in the autumn of 1833, eight thousand
members, of whom six thousand belonged to Staffordshire
and the remainder to the lodges at Newcastle-on-Tyne,
Derby, Bristol, and Swinton ^ — another instance of the
extraordinary growth of Trade Unions during these years.
How far these and other societies were joined together
in any federal body is not clear. The panic-stricken
references in the capitahst press to " the Trades Union,"
and the vague mention in working-class newspapers of the
affiliation of particular societies to larger organisations,
^ For an unfavourable account of this Union, see the extremely
biassed statement given in the pamphlet Character, Objects, and Effects oj
Trades Unions (1834). The employers seem to have regarded all the
demands of the men as equally unreasonable, even the request for a list
of piecework prices. See Times, October 2, 1833. A printed address
To the Flax and Hemp Trade of Great Britain, issued by the fJaxworkers
of Leeds, November 30, 1832, refers with admiration to the effectiveness
of this Union (Home Office Papers, 40—31 ; see also 41 — 11).
2 Times, October 28, 1833.
^ Crisis, October 19, 1833.
134 ^^^ Revolutionary Period
lead us to believe that during the 3^ear 1833 there was
more than one attempt to form a- " General Union of All
Trades." The Owenite newspapers, towards the end of
1833, are full of references to the formation of a " General
Union of the Productive Classes." What manner of
association Owen himself contemplated may be learnt
from his speech to the Congress of Owenite Societies in
London on the 6th of October. " I will now give you,"
said he, " a short outline of the great changes which are
in contemplation, and which shall come suddenly upon
society Hke a thief in the night. . . It is intended that
national arrangements shall be formed to include all the
working classes in the great organisation, and that each
department shall become acquai^nted with what is going
on in other departments ; that all individual competition
is to cease ; that all manufactures are to be carried on by
National Companies. . . . All trades shall first form Associa-
tions of lodges to consist of a convenient number for carry-
ing on the business : ... all individuals of the specific
craft shall become members." ^ Immediately after this we
find in existence a " Grand National Consolidated Trades
Union," in the establishment and extraordinary growth of
which the project of " the Trades Union " may be said
to have culminated. This organisation seems to have
actually started in January 1834. Owen was its chief
recruiter and propagandist. During the next few months
his activity was incessant ; and lodges were affiUated all
over the country. Innumerable local trade clubs were
^ Crisis, October 12, 1833. The history of the General Trades Unions
from 1832 to 1834 is mainly to be gathered from the files of the Owenite
press, the Crisis, 'the Pioneer, and the Herald of the liights of Industry,
with frequent ambiguous references in the Home Office Papers for these
years. The Poor Man's Guardian and the Man also contain occasional
references. The Official Gazette, issued by the Grand National Consoli-
dated Trades Union itself in June 1834, has unfortunately not been
preserved. We have also been unable to discover any copy of the
Glasgow Owenite journals, the Tradesman, Trades Advocate, Liberator,
etc., mostly edited or written by Owen's disciple, Alexander Campbell,
the secretary of the local joiners' Trade Union.
The " Grand National " 135
absorbed. Early in February 1834 a special delegate
meeting was held at Owen's London Institute in Charlotte
Street, Fitzroy Square, at which it was resolved that
the new body should take the form of a federation of
separate trade lodges, each lodge to be composed usually
of members of one trade, but with provision for " miscel-
laneous lodges " in places where the numbers were small,
and even for " female miscellaneous lodges." Each lodge
retained its own funds, levies being made throughout
the whole order for strike purposes. The Conference
urged each lodge to provide sick, funeral, and superannua-
tion benefits for its own members ; and proposals were
adopted to lease land on which to employ " turn-outs,"
and to set up co-operative workshops. The initiation
rites and solemn oath, common to all the Unions of the
period, were apparently adopted.
Nothing in the annals of Unionism in this country at
all approached the rapidity of the growth which ensued.'
Within a few weeks the Union appears to have been joined
by at least half a milHon members, including tens of
thousands of farm labourers and women. This must
have been in great measure due to the fact that, as no
discoverable regular contribution was exacted for central
expenses, the affiliation or absorption of existing organisa-
tions was very eas3^ Still, the extension of new lodges in
previously unorganised trades and districts was enormous.
Numerous missionary delegates, duly equipped with all
the paraphernaha required for the mystic initiation rites,
perambulated the country ; and a positive mania for
Trade Unionism set in. In December 1833 we are told
that " scarcely a branch of trade exists in the West of
^ It is interesting to notice how closely this organisation resembles,
in its Trade Union features, the well-known " Knights of Labour " of
the United States, established in 1869, and for some years one of the most
powerful labour organisations in the world (" Historical Sketch of the
Knights of Labour," by Carroll D. Wright, Quarterly Journal of Economics,
January, 1887). Its place was taken by the American Federation of
Labour, with exclusively Trade Union objects.
136 The Revolutionary Period
Scotland that is not now in a state of Union." ' The
Times reports that two delegates who went to Hull enrolled
in one evening a thousand men of various trades. ^ At
Exeter the two delegates were seized by the police, and
found to be furnished with " two wooden axes, two large
cutlasses, two masks, and two white garments or robes,
a large figure of Death with the dart and hourglass, a Bible
and Testament." ' Shop-assistants on the one hand,
and journeymen chimney-sweeps on the other, were swept
into the vortex. The cabinetmakers of Belfast insisted on
joining " the Trades Union, or Friendly Society, which
had for its object the unity of all cabinetmakers in the
three kingdoms." * We hear of " Ploughmen's Unions "
as far off as Perthshire,^ and of a " Shearman's Union " at
Dundee. And the then rural character of the Metro-
politan suburbs is quaintly brought home to us by the
announcement of a union of the " agricultural and other
labourers " of Kensington, Walham Green, Fulham, and
Hammersmith. Nor were the women neglected. The
" Grand Lodge of Operative Bonnet Makers " vies in
activity with the miscellaneous " Grand Lodge of the
Women of (ireat Britain and Ireland " ; and the " Lodge
of Female Tailors " asks indignantly whether the " Tailors'
Order " is really going to prohibit women from making
waistcoats. Whether the Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union was responsible for the lodges of " Female
Gardeners" and "Ancient Virgins," who afterwards dis-
tinguished themselves in the riotous demand for an eight
hours day at Oldham,'* is not clear.
How the business of this colossal federation was actually
* Glasgow Argus, quoted in People's Conservative, December 28, 1.S33.
2 May 5. 183.4.
^ Times, January 23 and 30. 1834.
* Kerr's Exposition of Legislative Tyranny and Defence of the Trades
Union (Belfast, 1834), vol. 161 1 of the Halliday Tracts in the Koyal Irish
Academy, Dublin ; see 7 he Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Kyan, 1919.
* Poor Man's Guardian, July 20, 1834.
' Times, .^I'fil ly, 1834.
The "Derby Turn-outs" 137
managed we do not know.^ Some kind of executive com-
mittee sat in London, with four paid officers. The need
for statesmanhke administration was certainly great. The
avowed poHcy of the federation was to inaugurate a general
expropriatory strike of all wage -earners throughout the
country, not " to condition with the master-producers of
wealth and knowledge for some paltry advance in the arti-
ficial money price in exchange for their labour, health,
liberty, natural enjo\Tnent, and life ; but to ensure to
every one the best cultivation of all their faculties and the
most advantageous exercise of all their powers." But
from the very beginning of its career it found itself inces-
santly involved in sectional disputes for small advances
of wages and reduction of hours. The mere joining of
" the Trades Union " was often made the occasion of the
dismissal by the employers of all those who would not
sign the " document " abjuring all combinations. Thus
the accession of the Leicester Hosiers in November 1833
led to a disastrous dispute, in which over 1300 men had
to be supported. In Glasgow a serious strike broke out
among the building trades at a time when the Calico-
printers, Engineers, and Cabinetmakers were already
struggling with their employers. The most costly conflict,
however, which the Grand National found on its hands
during the winter was that which raged at Derby, where
fifteen hundred men, women, and children had been locked
out by their employers for refusing to abandon the Union.
The " Derby turn-outs " were at first supported, like their
fellow-victims elsewhere, by contributions sent from the
trade organisations in various parts of the kingdom ; but
it soon became evident that without systematic aid they
^ The only record of this organisation knov/n to us is a copy of the
Rules in the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London, which
we print, in the Appendix. A "Memorial from the Grand National
Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland to the Producers
and Non-Producers of Wealth and Knowledge " is printed in the Crisis,
May 17, 1834; another, "to the Shopmen, Clerks, Porters and other
industrious non-producers," in the issue for April 26, 1834.
F 2
138 The Revolutionary Pctiod
would be compt'llcd to give way. A levy of a shilling per
member was accordingly decreed by the Grand National
Executive in February 1834. Arrangements were made
for obtaining premises and machinery upon which to set
a few of the strikers to work on their own account. The
struggle ended, after four months, in the complete triumph
of the employers, and the return of the operatives to work.
The " Derby turn-out " was widely advertised by the
newspapers, and brought much odium on the Grand National.
But the denunciation of " the Trades Union " greatly
increased when part of London was laid in darkness by a
strike of the gas-stokers. The men employed by the different
gas companies in the metropolis had been quietly' organising
during the winter, with the intention of simultaneously
withdrawing from work if their demands were not acceded
to. The plot was discovered, and the companies succeeded
in replacing their Union workpien by others. But weeks
elapsed before the new hands were able completely to per-
form their work,^ and early in March 1834 Westminster
was for some days in partial darkness. Amid the storm of
obloquy caused by these disputes the Grand National
suddenl}' found itself in conflict with the law. The con-
viction of six Dorchester labourers in March 1834 for the
mere act of administering an oath, and their sentence to
seven years' transportation, came like a thunderbolt on
the Trade Union world.
To understand such a barbarous sentence we must
picture to ourselves the effect on the minds of the Govern-
ment and the propertied classes of the menacing ideal
of " the Trades Union," brought home by the aggressive
policy of the Unions during the lajt four years. Already
in 1830 the formation of national and General Unions had
excited the attention of the Government. " When we first
came into ofhce in November last," writes Lord Melbourne,
the Whig Home Secretary, to Sir Herbert Taylor, " the
* Sec the London newspapers for March 1834 ; a good summary is
given in the Companion to the Newspaper for that month (p. 71).
Nassau Senior 139
Unions of trades in the North of England and in other
parts of the country for the purpose of raising wages, etc.,
and the General Union for the same purpose, were pointed
out to me by Sir Robert Peel [the outgoing Tory Home
Secretary] in a conversation I had with him upon the then
state of the country, as the most formidable difficulty and
danger with which we had to contend ; and it struck me
as well as the rest of His Majesty's servants in the same
light." 1
To advise the Cabinet in this difficulty Lord Melbourne
called in Nassau Senior, who had just completed his first
term of five years as Professor of Political Economy at
Oxford, and directed him to prepare, in conjunction with
a legal expert named Tomlinson, a report on the situation
and a plan of remedial legislation. This document throws
light both on the state of mind and on the practical judge-
ment of the trusted economist. The two commissioners
appear to have made no inquiries among workmen, and to
have accepted implicitly every statement, including hearsay
gossip, offered by employers. The evidence thus collected
naturally led to a very unfavourable conclusion. It pro-
duced, as the commissioners recite, " upon our minds the
conviction that if the innocent and laborious workman and
his family are to be left without protection against the
cowardly ferocity by which he is now assailed ; if the
manufacturer is to employ his capital and the mechanist
or chemist his ingenuity, only under the dictation of his
short-sighted and rapacious workmen, or hi^ equally ignorant
and avaricious rivals ; if a few agitators are to be allowed to
command a strike which first paralyses the industry of the
peculiar class of workpeople over whom they tyrannise,
^ September 26, 1831 : Lord Melbourne's Papers (i88g), ch. v. p. 130.
The note he left on leaving the Home Office was as follows : "I take the
liberty of recommending the whole of this correspondence re the Union
to the immediate and serious consideration of my successor at the Home
Department " (Home Office Papers, 40 — 27). See also the statements in
the House of Lords debate, Times, April 29, 1834 ; and the comments in
Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by George
Howell, 1902, p. 23.
140 The Revolutionary Period
and then extends itself in an increasing circle over the
many thousands and tens of thousands 10 whose labour
the assistance of that peculiar class of workpeople is essen-
tial ; — that if all this is to be unpunished, and to be almost
sanctioned by the repeal of the laws by which it was formerly
punishable ; — it is in vain to hope that we shall long retain
the industry, the skill, or the capital on which our manu-
facturing superiority, and with that superiority our power
and almost our existence as a nation, depends." They
accordingly conclude with a series of astounding proposals
for the amendment of the law. The Act of 1825 could
not conveniently be openly repealed ; but its mischievous
results were to be counteracted by drastic legislation.
They recommend that a law should be passed clearly reciting
the common law prohibitions of conspiracy and restraint
of trade. The law should go on to forbid, under severe
penalties, " all attempts or solicitations, combinations,
subscriptions, and solicitations to combinations " to threaten
masters, to persuade blacklegs, or even simply to ask work-
men to join the Union. ^ Picketing, however peaceful, was
to be comprehensively forbidden and ruthlessly punished.
Employers or their assistants were to be authorised them-
selves to arrest men without summons or warrant, and hale
them before any justice of the peace. The encouragement
of combinations by masters was to be punished by heavy
pecuniary penalties, to be recovered by any common informer.
" This," say the commissioners, " is as much as we should
recommend in the first instance. But if it should be proved
that the evil of the combination sNstem cannot be subdued
at a less price, . . . we must recommend the experiment of
confiscation," — confiscation, that is, of the " funds sub-
scribed for purposes of combination and deposited in Savings
Banks or otherwise." ^
' " \Vc recommend that the soliciting of any person to join in com-
binations, or to subscribe to the Hke purposes, should be punishable on
summary conviction by imprisonment for a shorter period, say not ex-
ceeding two months."
* The report was never published, and lies in MS. in the Home
Lord Melbourne 141
The \\Tiig Government dared not submit either the
report or the proposals to a House of Commons pledged
to the doctrines of Philosophic Radicalism, " We con-
sidered much ourselves," writes Lord Melbourne/ " and
we consulted much with others as to whether the arrange-
ments of these unions, their meetings, their communica-
Office library. Ten years later, when Nassau Senior was acting as
Commissioner to report on the condition of the handloom weavers,
he revived a good deal of his 1830 Report, but not the astonishing
proposals quoted in the text. The portion thus revived appears in
his Historical and Philosophical Essays (1865), vol. ii. We had
placed in our hands, through the kindness of Mrs. Simpson, daughter
of Nassau Senior, the original answers and letters upon which his
report was based. This correspondence shows that the leading Man-
chester manufacturers were not agreed upon the desirability of re-enact-
ing the Combination Laws, though they, with one accord, advocated
stringent repression of picketing. Nor were they clear that combinations
had, on the whole, hindered the introduction of new machinery, one
employer even maintaining that the Unions indirectly promoted its
adoption. But the most interesting feature of the correspondence is the
extent to which the employers complained of the manner in which their
rivals incited, and even subsidised, strikes against attempted reductions of
rates. The millowner, whose improved processes gave him an advantage
in the market, found any corresponding reduction of piecework rates
resisted, not only by his own operatives, but by all the other manu-
facturers in the district, who sometimes went so far as to pubhsh a joint
declaration that any such reduction was ' highly inexpedient.' The
evidence, in fact, from Nassau Senior's point of view, justified his
somewhat remarkable proposal to punish employers for conniving at
combinations.
^ Lord Melbourne to Sir Herbert Taylor, September 26, 1831 {Papers,
chap. v. p. 131). The workmen's combinations began at this time to
attract more serious attention from capable students than they had
hitherto received. Two able pamphlets, published anonymously — there
is reason to believe at the instance and at the cost of the Whig Govern-
ment— On Combinations of Trades (1830), and Character, Objects, and Effects
of Trades Unions (1834), set forth the constitution and proceedings of the
new unions, and criticise their pretensions in a manner which has not
since been surpassed. The second of these was by Edward Carlton
Tufnell, one of the factory commissioners, and remains perhaps the best
statement of the case against Trades Unionism. Tufnell also wrote a
pamphlet, entitled Trades Unionism and Strikes (1834 ; i2mo) ; and
Harriet Martineau one On the Tendency of Strikes and Sticks to produce
■' Low Wages (Durham, 1834 ; i2mo), neither of which we have seen. A
well-informed but hostile article, founded on these materials, appeared
in the Edinburgh Review for July 1834. Charles Knight pubhshed in
the same year a sixpenny pamphlet. Trades Unions and Strikes (1834,
99 PP). which took the form of a bitter denunciation of the whole move-
ment.
142 The Revolutionary Period
tions, or their pecuniary funds could be reached or in any
way prevented by any new legal provisions ; but it appeared
upon the whole impossible to do anything effectual unless
we proposed such measures as would have been a serious
infringement upon the constitutional liberties of the country,
and to which it would have been impossible to have obtained
the consent of Pariiament."
The King, however, had been greatly alarmed at the
meeting of the " Builders' Parliament," and pressed the
Cabinet to take strong measures.^ Rotch, the member for
Knaresborough, gave notice in April 1834 of his intention
to bring in a Bill designed to make combinations of trades
impossible — a measure which would have obtained a
large amount of support from the manufacturers.- The
coal-owners and ship-owners, the ironmasters, had all
been pressing the Home Secretary for legislation of this
kind.
But although Lord Melbourne's prudent caution saved
the Unions from drastic prohibitory laws, the Government
lost no opportunity of showing its hostiUty to the work-
men's combinations. When in August 1833 the Yorkshire
manufacturers presented a memorial on the subject of
" the Trades Union," Lord Melbourne directed the answer
to be returned that " he considers it unnecessary to repeat
the strong opinion entertained by His Majesty's Ministers
of the criminal character and the evil effects of the unions
described in the Memorial," adding that " no doubt can be
entertained that combinations for the purposes enumerated
are illegal conspiracies, and Uable to be prosecuted as such
at common law." ^ The employers scarcely needed this
hint. Although combination for the sole purpose of fixing
hours or wages had ceased to be illegal, it was possible
1 See his letter of March 30, 1834, in Lord Melbottrtw's Papers, chap. v.
» Leeds Mercury, April 26, 1834. Joseph Hume said he had had the
" greatest diflkulty in prevaihng upon the Ministers not to bring in a
hill for putting down the Trades Unions " {Poor Man's Guardian, March
» Letter dated September 3, 1833. in limes, September 9, 1833.
Repression 143
to prosecute the workmen upon various other pretexts.
Sometimes, as in the case of some Lancashire miners
in 1832, the Trade Unionists were indicted for illegal
combination for merely writing to their employers that a
strike would take place. ^ Sometimes the " molestation or
obstruction " prohibited in the Act of 1825 was made
to include the mere intimation of the men's intention to
strike against the employment of non-unionists. In a
remarkable case at Wolverhampton in August 1835, four
potters were imprisoned for intimidation, solely upon
evidence by the employers that they had " advanced their
prices in consequence of the interference of the defendants,
who acted as plenipotentiaries for the men," without, as
was admitted, the use of even the mildest threat."- Picket-
ing, even of the most peaceful kind, was frequently severely
punished under this head, as four Southwark shoemakers
found in 1832 to their cost.^ More generall}^ the men on
strike were proceeded against under the laws relating to
masters and servants, as in the case of seventeen tanners
at Bermondsey in February 1834, who were sentenced
to imprisonment for the offence of leaving their work
unfinished.*
With the authorities in this temper, their alarm at the
growth of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
may be imagined. A new legal weapon was soon discovered.
At the time of the mutiny at the Nore in 1797 an Act
had been passed (37 Geo. IIL c. 123) severely penalising
the administering of an oath by an unlawful society. In
1819, when political sedition was rife, a measure prohibiting
unlawful oaths had formed one of the notorious " Six Acts."
In neither case were trade combinations aimed at, though
^ R. V. Bykerdike, i IMoo. and Rob. 179, Lancaster Assizes, 1832. A
letter was WTitten to certain coal-owners, " by order of the Board of
Directors for the body of coal-miners," stating that unless certain men
were discharged t"he miners would strike. Held to be an illegal com-
bination. See Leeds Mercury, May 24, 1834.
2 Times, August 22, 1835.
^ Poor Man's Guardian, September 29, 1832,
* Times, February 27, 1834.
144 ^^'^ Revolutionary Period
Lord Ellenborough, in an isolated prosecution in 1802/ had
held that an oath administered by a committee of journey-
men shearmen in Wiltshire came within the terms of the
earlier statute. It does not seem to have occurred to any
one to put the law in force against Trade Unions until the
oath-bound confederacy of the Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union began to make headway even in the rural
villages of the South of England.
The story of the trial and transportation of the Dor-
chester labourers is the best-known episode of earl}^ Trade
Union history. ^ The agricultural labourers of the southern
counties, oppressed by the tacit combinations of the farmers
and by the operation of the Corn Laws, as well as excep-
tionally demoralised by the Old Poor Law, had long been in
a state of sullen despair. The specially hard times of 1829
had resulted in outbursts of machine-breaking, rick-burning,
and hunger riots, which had been put down in 1830 by
the movement of troops through the disturbed districts,
and the appointment of a Special Commission of Assize to
try over 1000 prisoners, several of whom were hung and
hundreds transported. The whole wage-earning population
of these rural districts was effectually cowed. ^ With
the improvement of trade a general movement for higher
^ R. V. Marks and others, 3 East Rep. 157.
* Lengthy accounts appeared in the newspapers for March and April
1834. The indictment is given in full in the House of Commons Return,
No. 250, of 1835 (June ist). The legal report is in 6 C. and P. 596 (R. v.
Loveless and others). The Times reported the judge's charge at some
length, March 18, 1834, and the case itself March zo, 1834, giving the
rules of the projected union. An able article in the Law Magazine, vol xi.
pp. 460-72, discusses the law of the case. The defendants subsequently
published two statements for popular circulation, viz. Victims of Whiggery,
a statement of the persecution experienced by the Dorchester Labourers, by
George Loveless (1837), and A narrative of the sufferings of James Love-
less, etc. (1S38), which are in the British Museum. See also Labour Legis-
lation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902, pp.
62-75 ; Spencer VValpole's History of lingland, vol. iii. chap. xiii. pp.
229-31 ; and Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vols. xxtt. and x.xiii.
^ The student is referred to the admirable account of these proceed-
ings in The Village Labourer, by J. L. antl H. Hammond, 1912. See, for
a contemporary account. Stt'itig Unmasked, or the Cause of Rural In-
cindiarism, by G. C. Wakefield, M.P , 1831.
The Dorchester Labourers 145
wages seems to have been set on foot. In 1832 we find
the Duke of WeUington, as Lord-Lieutenant of Hampshire,
reporting to Lord Melbourne that more than half the
labourers in his county were contributing a penny per week
to a network of local societies affiliated, as he thought,
to some National Union. " The labourers said that they
had received directions from the Union not to take less
than ten shillings, and that the Union would stand by them.''^
These societies, whatever may have been their constitution,
had apparently the effect of raising wages not onl}^ in
Hampshire, but also in the neighbouring counties. In
the village of Tolpuddle, in Dorsetshire, as George Loveless
tells us, an agreement was made between the farmers and
the men, in the presence of the viUage parson, that the
wages should be those paid in other districts. This involved
a rise to ten shillings a week. In the following year the
farmers repented of their decision, and successively reduced
wages shilling by shilling until they were paying only
seven shillings a week. In this strait the men made inquiries
about " the Trades Union," and two delegates from the
Grand National visited the village. Upon their information
the Lovelesses established " the Friendly Society of Agri-
cultural Labourers," having its " Grand Lodge " at Tol-
puddle. For this village club the elaborate ritual and
code of rules of one of the national orders of the Grand
National Consolidated Trades Union were adopted. No
secrecy seems to have been observed, for John Loveless
openly ordered of the village painter a figure of " Death
painted six feet high for a society of his own," ^ with which
to perform the initiation rites. The farmers took alarm,
and induced the local magistrates, on February 21, 1834,
to issue placards warning the labourers that any one joining
^ Lord Melbourne's Papers, pp. 147-150, letters dated November 3
and 7, 1832. Lord Melbourne seems to have thought, probably quite
incorrectly, that these rural organisations were in connection with the
political organisation called the National Union of the Working Classes,
founded by William Lovett in 1831, to support the Reform Bill.
2 Times, March 20, 1834.
146 The Revolutionary Period
the Union would be sentenced to seven years' transportation.
This was no idle threat. Within three days of the publica-
tion of the notice the Lovelesses and four other members
were arrested and lodged in gaol.
The trial of these unfortunate labourers was a scandalous
perversion of the law. The Lovelesses and their friends
seem to have been simple-minded Methodists, two of them
being itinerant preachers. No accusation was made, and
no evidence preferred against them, of anything worse
than the playing with oaths, which, as we have seen, formed
a part of the initiation ceremony of the Grand National
and other Unions of the time, with evidently no conscious-
ness of their statutory illegality. Not only were they
guiltless of any intimidation or outrage, but they had not
even struck or presented any application for higher wages.
Yet the judge (John Williams), who had only recently
been raised to the bench, charged the grand jury on the
case at portentous length, as if the prisoners had com-
mitted murder or treason, and inflicted on them, after the
briefest of trials, the monstrous sentence of seven years'
transportation.
The action of the Government shows how eagerly the
Home Secretary accepted the blunder of an inexperienced
judge as part of his policy of repression. Lord Melbourne
expressed his opinion that " the law has in this case been
most properly applied " ; ^ and the sentence, far from
exciting criticism in the Whig Cabinet, was carried out
with special celerity. The case was tried on March 18,
1834 ; before the 30th the prisoners were in the hulks ;
and by the 15th of the next month Lord Howick was able
to say in the House of Commons that their ship had already
sailed for Botany Bay.-
The Grand National ConsoUdated Trades Union proved
to have a wider influence than the Government expected.
* Lord Melbourne's Papers, p. 158.
^ Times, March 18, 20, 31; April i, 10, n;, 1^34; 1 eeds Mt'tcnry,
April 26. 1834.
The London Demonstration . 147
The whole machinery of the organisation was turned to
the preparation of petitions and the holding of public
meetings, and a wave of sympathy rallied, for a few weeks,
the drooping energies of the members. Cordial relations
were established with the five great Unions which remained
outside the ranks, for the northern counties were mainly
organised by the Builders' Union, the Leeds, Huddersfield
and Bradford District Union, the Clothiers' Union, the
Cotton-spinners' Union, and the Potters' Union, which
on this occasion sent delegates to London to assist the
executive of the Grand National. The agitation culminated
in a monster procession of Trade Unionists to the Home
Office to present a petition to Lord Melbourne — the first
of the great " demonstrations " which have since become
a regular part of the machinery of London pohtics. The
proposal to hold this procession had excited the utmost
alarm, both in friends and to foes. The Times, with the
Parisian events of 1830 still in its memory, wrote leader
after leader condemning the project, and Lord Melbourne
let it be known that he would refuse to receive any deputation
or petition from a procession. Special constables were
sworn in, and troops brought into London to prevent a
rising. At length the great day arrived (April 21, 1834).
Owen and his friends managed the occasion with much
skill. In order to avoid interference by the new police,
the vacant ground at Copenhagen Fields, on which the
processionists assembled, was formally hired from the owner.
The trades were regularly marshalled behind thirty-three
banners, each man decorated by a red ribbon. At the
head of the procession rode, in full canonicals and the scarlet
hood of a Doctor of Divinity, the corpulent " chaplain to
the Metropolitan Trades Unions," Dr. Arthur S. Wade.^
The demonstration, in point of numbers, was undoubtedly
a success. We learn, for instance, that the tailors alone
paraded from 5000 to 7000 strong, and the master builders
^ A prominent Owenite agitator of the time, incumbent of St. Nicholas,
Warwick, who is said to have been inhibited from preaching by his bishop.
148 The Revolutionary Period
subsequently complained that their works had been entirely
suspended through their men's participation. Over a
quarter of a miUion signatures had been obtained to the
petition, and, even on the admission of the Times, 30,000
persons took part in the procession, representing a pro-
portion of the London of that time equivalent to 100,000
to-day.^
Meanwliile Radicals of all shades hastened to the rescue.
A public meeting was held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern
at which Roebuck, Colonel Perronet Thompson, and Daniel
O'Connell spoke ; and a debate took place in the House
of Commons in which the ferocious sentence was strongly
attacked by Joseph Hume.^ But the Government, far from
remitting the punishment, refused even to recognise that
it was excessive ; and the unfortunate labourers were
allowed to proceed to their penal exile. ^
The Dorchester conviction had the effect of causing
the oath to be ostensibly dropped out of Trade Union
ceremonies, although in particular trades and districts
1 Times, April 22 ; Companion to the Newspaper, May and June 1834.
Trade Union accounts declare that 100,000 to 200,000 persons were present.
A detailed description of the day is given in Somerville's .(^ j</t»fcjo^ra/)/i^
of a Working Man (1848), not usually a trustworthy work.
'^ Times. April 19, 1834..
^ The agitation for their release was kept up, both in and out of
Parliament, by the " London Dorchester Committee " ; and in 1S30 tlu-
remainder of the sentence was remitted. Through official blundering it
was two years later (April 1838) before five out of the si.x prisoners re-
turned home. The sixth, as we learn from a circular of the Committee,
dated August 20, 1838, had even then not arrived. " Great and lasting
honour," writes a well-informed contemporary, " is due to this body of
workmen (the London Dorchester Committee), about si.xtcen in number,
by whose indefatigable e.xertions, extending over a period of five years,
and the valuable assistance of Thomas Wakley, M.P. for Finsbury, tin
same Government who banished the men were compelled to pardoi.
them and bring them home free of expense. From the subscriptions
raised by tiie wi)rking classes during this period, amounting to ab<iut
j^i300, the Committee, on the return ol the men, were enabled to plai r
five of them, with their families, in small farms in Essex, the sixth pn
ferring (with his share of the fund) to return tt> his native place." (ArticK
in the British Statesman, .April y, 1842, preserved in Place MSS. 27820
320.) See also Mouse uf Commons Return, No. lyi of 1837 (April 12) :
and Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxxii. p. 253.
The Tailors' Strike 149
it lingered a few years longer.^ At their " parliament "
in April 1834 the Builders' Union formally abolished
the oath. The Grand National quickly adopted the same
course ; and the Leeds and other Unions followed suit.
But the judge's sentence was of no avail to check the
aggressive policy of the Unions. Immediately after the
excitement of the procession had subsided, one of the
most important branches of the Grand National precipitated
a serious conflict with its employers. The London tailors,
hitherto divided among themselves, formed in December
1833 the " First Grand Lodge of Operative Tailors," and
resolved to demand a shortening of the hours of labour.
The state of mind of the men is significantly shown by the
language of their peremptory notice to the masters. " In
order," they write, " to stay the ruinous effects which a
destructive commercial competition has so long been
inflicting on the trade, they have resolved to introduce
certain new regulations of labour into the trade, which regu-
lations they intend shall come into force on Monday next."
A general strike ensued, in which 20,000 persons are said
to have been thrown out of work, the whole burden of their
maintenance being cast on the Grand National funds. A
levy of eighteenpence per member throughout the country
was made in May 1834, which caused some dissatisfaction ;
and the proceeds were insufficient to prevent the tailors'
strike pay falling to four shillings a week. The result was
^ The series of " Initiation Parts," or forms to be observed on admis-
sion of new members, which are preserved in the archives of the Stone-
masons' Society, reveal the steady tendency to siirplification of ritual.
We have first the old MS. doggerel already described, dating probably from
1832. The first print of 1834, whilst retaining a good deal of the cere-
monial, turns the liturgy into prose and the oath into an almost identical
" declaration," invoking the " dire displeasure " of the Society in case of
treachery. The second print, which bears no date, is much shorter ; and
the declaration becomes a mere affirmation of adhesion. The Society's
circulars of 1838 record the abolition, by vote of the members, of all
initiation ceremonies, in view of the Parliamentary Inquiry about to be
held into Trade Unionism. But even the simplified form of 1838 retains,
in its reference to the workmen as " the real producers of all wealth," an
unmistakable trace of the Owenite spirit of the Builders' Union of 1832.
150 The Revolutionary Period
that the men gradually returned to work on tlie employers'
terms. 1
These disasters, together with innumerable smaller
strikes in various parts, all of which tvere unsuccessful,
shook the credit of the Grand National. The -Executive
attempted in vain to stem the torrent of strikes by publish-
ing a " Declaration of the Views and Objects of Trades
Unions," in which they deprecated disputes and advocated
what would now be called Co-operative Production by
Associations of Producers. ^ They gave effect to this
declaration by refusing to sanction the London shoemakers'
demand for increased wages, on the ground that a conflict
so soon after the tailors' defeat was inopportune. The
result was merely that a general meeting of the London
shoemakers voted, by 782 to 506, for secession from the
federation, and struck on their own account.^
An even more serious blow was the lock-out of the
London building trades in July 1834. These trades in
London had joined the Grand Consolidated rather than
the Builders' tTnion ; and in the summer of 1834 an act of
petty tyranny on the part of a single firm brought about
a general conflict. The workmen employed by Messrs.
Cubitt had resolved not to drink any beer supplied by
Combe, Delafield & Co., in retaliation for the refusal of
that firm to employ Trade Unionists. Messrs. Cubitt
thereupon refused to allow any other beer to be drunk
on their premises, and locked out their workmen. The
employers throughout London, angered by the Union's
resistance to sub-contract and piecework, embraced this
opportunity to insist that all their employees should sign
the hated " document." The heads of the Government
^ Times, April 30 to June 10 ; House of Lords debate, April 28 ;
G/o6e, May 21, 1834; Home Office Papers, May 10, 1834, 40 — 32; The
Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896.
2 Leeds Mercury, May 3, 1834.
^ See the address of the " Grand Master " to the " Operative Cord-
wainers of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union," Crisis,
June 28, 1834 ; also limes, May 2, 1834 ; Home Office Papers, 40 — 32.
The Builders' Strike 151
departments in which building operatives were employed
placed themselves in line with private employers by making
the same demands,^ The struggle dragged on until
November 1834, when the document seems to have been
tacitly withdrawn, and the men returned to work, accepting
the employers' terms on the other points at issue. ^ We
learn from the correspondence of the Stonemasons' Society
that this defeat — for such it virtually was — completely
broke up the organisation in the London building trade.
What was happening to the Builders' Union during these
months is not clear. The federal organisation apparently
broke up at about this time ; and the several trades fell
back upon their local clubs and national societies.
Whilst the Loiidon builders were thus engaged, similar
struggles were going on in the other leading industries.
At Leeds, for instance, in May 1834 the masters were
again presenting the " document " ; and the men, after
much resistance and angry denunciation, were compelled
to abandon the Clothiers' Union, The Cotton-spinners,
whom we left preparing to carry out Fielden's idea of
a general strike for an eight hours day with undiminished
wages for all cotton operatives, resolved to demand the
reduction of hours from the ist of March 1834, the day
appointed for the operation of the new Factory Act of
1833 limiting the hours of children to eight per day. The
operatives in many mills sent in notices, which were simply
ignored by the employers. In this they seem to have
estimated the weakness of the men correctly ; for the
expected general strike was deferred by a delegate meeting
until the 2nd of June. That date found the men still un-
prepared for action, and the strike was further postponed
until the ist of September. After that we hear no more of it.
The Oldham operatives did indeed in April 1834 make
^ Times, August 21, 1834.
2 Statement of the Master Builders of the Metropolis in explanation of
the differences between them and the workmen respecting the Trades Unions,
1834. See also Times, July 27 to November 29, 1834.
152 The Revolutionary Period
an unpremeditated attempt to secure eight hours. It hap-
pened that the local constables broke up a Trade Union
meeting. A rescue took place, followed by an attack on
an obnoxious mill, and the shooting of one of the rioters
by a " Knobstick." The affray provoked the Oldham
working class into a spasm of insurrection. The workers
in all trades, both male and female, ceased work, and held
huge meetings on the Moor, where they were addressed by
Doherty and others from . Manchester, and demanded the
eight hours day. Within a week the excitement subsided,
and work was resumed.^
By the end of the summer it was obvious that the
ambitious projects of the Grand National Consohdated
and other " Trades Unions " had ended in invariable and
complete failure. In spite of the rising prosperity of trade,
the strikes for better conditions of labour had been uni-
formly unsuccessful. In July 1834 the federal organisa-
tions all over the country were breaking up. The great
association of half a milhon members had been completely
routed by the employers' vigorous presentation of the
" document." Of the actual dissolution of the organisation
we have no contemporary record, but the impression which
it made on the more sober Trade Unionists may be gathered
from the following description, which appeared in a working-
class journal seven years afterwards. "We were present,"
says the editor of the Trades Jourjial, " at man}'' of the
meetings of the Grand National Consohdated Trades Union,
and have a distinct recollection of the excitement that pre-
vailed in them — of the apparent determination to carry
out its principles in opposition to every obstacle — of the
enthusiasm exhibited by some of the speakers — of the
noisy approbation of the meeting — the loud cries of ' hear
hear,' ' bravo,' ' hurra,' ' union for ever,' etc. It was the
^ The Times honoured these events bj- long descriptive reports from
its " own correspondent," then an unusual practice ; see the issues from
April 17 to 25, 1834. A good account is also to be found in the Leeds
Mercury, April 19 and 26, 1834 ; see also the History of the Marcroft
Family (1889), pp. 1036.
The Collapse 153
opinion of many at that time that Httle real benefit would
be effected by this union, as their proceedings were indicative,
not of a calm and dispassionate investigation of the causes
of existing evils, but of an over-excited state of mind which
would speedily evaporate, and leave them in the same
condition as before. The event proved that this opinion
was not ill-founded. A Httle mole-hill obstructed their
onward progress ; and rather than commence the labour
of removing so puny an obstacle, they chose to turn back,
each taking his own path, regardless of the safety or the
interests of his neighbour. It was painful to see the deep
mortification of the generals and leaders of this quickly
inflated army, when left deserted and alone upon the field." ^
A period of general apathy in the Trade Union world
ensued. The " London Dorchester Committee " continued
with indomitable perseverance to collect subscriptions and
present petitions for the return of the six exiled labourers ;
but " the Trades Union," together with the ideal from
which it sprang, vanished in discredit. The hundreds of
thousands of recruits from the new industries or unskilled
occupations rapidly reverted to a state of disorganisation.
The national " orders " of Tailors and Shoemakers, the
extended organisations of Cotton-spinners and Woollen-
workers, split up into fragmentary societies. Throughout
the country the organised constituents of the Grand National
fell back upon their local trade clubs.
The records of the rise and fall of the " New Unionism "
of 1830-4 leave us conscious of a vast enlargement in the
ideas of the workers, without any corresponding alteration
in their tactics in the field. In council they are idealists,
dreaming of a new heaven and a new earth; humanitarians,
educationahsts, socialists, moralists : in battle they are still
the struggling, half -emancipated serfs of 1825, armed only
with the rude weapons of the strike and boycott ; some-
^ Trades Journal, March i, 1841 ; probably written by Alexander
Hutchinson, general secretary of the Friendly United Smiths of Great
Britain and Ireland.
154 ^^^^ Revolutionary Period
times feared and hated by the propertied classes ; sometimes
merely despised ; always oppressed, and miserably poor.
We find, too, that they are actually less successful with the
old weapons now that they wield them with new and wider
ideas. They get beaten in a rising market instead of, as
hitherto, only in a falling one. And we shall soon see that
they did not recover their lost advantage until they again con-
centrated their efforts on narrower and more manageable aims.
But we have first to inquire how they came by the new ideas.
In the bad times which followed the peace of 1815 the
writings of Cobbett had attained an extraordinary influence
and authority over the whole of that generation of working
men. His trenchant denunciation of the governing classes,
and his incessant appeals to the wage-earners to assert their
right to the whole administration of affairs, were inspired
by the political tyranny of the anti- Jacobin reaction, the
high prices and heavy taxes, and the apparent creation by
" the Fundijig System " of an upstart class of non-producers
living on the interest of the huge debt contracted by the
nation during the war — evils the least of which was enough
to stimulate an eager politician like Cobbett to the utmost
exercise of his unrivalled power of invective. But the
working classes were suffering, in addition, from a calamity
which no mere politician of that time grasped, in the effects
of the new machine and factory industry, which was bUndly
crushing out the old methods by the mere brute force of
competition instead of replacing it with due order and
adjustment to the human interests involved. This pheno-
menon was beyond the comprehension of its victims. Each
of them knew what was happening to himself as an indivi-
dual ; but only one man — a manufacturer — seems to have
understood what was happening to the entire industry of
the country. This man was Robert Owen. To him,
therefore, political Democracy, which was all-in-all to
Cobbett and his readers, appeared quite secondary to
industrial Democracy, or the co-operative ownership and
control of industry answerable to the economic co-operation
The Disillusionment 155
in all industrial processes which had been brought about
by machinery' and factory organisation, and which had
removed manufacture irrevocably from the separate fire-
sides of independent individual producers. With Cobbett
and his followers the first thing to be done was to pass a
great Reform Bill, behind which, in their minds, lay only
a vague conception of social change. Owen and his more
enthusiastic disciples, on the other hand, were persuaded
that a universal voluntary association of workers for pro-
ductive purposes on his principles would render the pohtical
organisation of society of comparatively trivial account.
The disillusionment of the newly emancipated Trade
Clubs in the collapse of 1825 left the working-class organisa-
tions prepared for these wdder gospels. Social reform was
in the air. " Concerning the misery and degradation of
the bulk of the people of England," writes a contemporary
observer, " men of every order, as well as every party, unite
and speak continually ; farmers, parish officers, clergymen,
magistrates, judges on the bench, members on either side
of both Houses of Parliament, the King in his addresses
to the nation, morahsts, statesmen, philosophers ; and
finally the poor creatures themselves, whose complaints
are loud and incessant." ^ Cobbett and the Reformers had
the first turn. The chief political organisation of the
working classes during the Reform Bill agitation began as
a trade club. In 183 1 a few carpenters met at their house
of call in Argjde Street, Oxford Street, to form a " Metro-
pohtan Trades Union," which was to include all trades,
and to undertake, besides its Trade Union functions, a
vague scheme of co-operative production and a political
agitation for the franchise. ^ But under the influence of
^ England and America : a Comparison of the Social and Political State
of both Nations, 1833, 2 vols.
^ Poor Man's Guardian, March 12, 1831 ; Place MSS. 27791 — 246,
272. " There were seven Co-operative Congresses in the years 1830-5
in which the Trade Union and Labour Exchange elements were prominent "
(Prof. Foxwell's Introduction to The Right to the Full Produce of Labour,
by Anton Menger, 1899).
156 The Revolutionary Period
William Lovett the last object soon thrust aside all the
rest. The purely Trade Union aims were dropped ; the
Owenite aspirations sank into the background ; and under
the title of the " National Union of the Working Classes "
the humble carpenters' society expanded into a national
organisation for obtaining Manhood Suffrage. As such it
occupies, during the political turmoil of 1831-2, b}/ far the
largest place in the history , of working-class organisation,
and was largely implicated in the agitation and disturbances
connected with the Reform Bill.^
The Reform Bill came and passed, but no Manhood
Suffrage. The effect of this disappointment at the hands
of the most advanced political party in the country is thus
described by Francis Place, now become an outside observer
of the Trade Union Movement. " The year (1833) ended
leaving the (National) Union (of the Working Classes) in
a state of much depression. The nonsensical doctrines
preached by Robert Owen and others respecting communi-
ties and goods in common ; abundance of everything man
ought to desire, and all for four hours' labour out of every
twenty-four ; the right of every man to his share of the
earth in common, and his right to whatever his hands had
been employed upon ; the power of masters under the
present system to give just what wages they pleased ; the
right of the labourer to such wages as would maintain him
and his in comfort for eight or ten hours' labour ; the right
of every man who was unemployed to employment and to
such an amount of wages as have been indicated — and
other matters of a similar kind which were continuall}'
inculcated by the working men's political unions, by many
small knots of persons, printed in small pamphlets and
handbills which were sold twelve for a penny and distributed
to a great extent — had pushed politics aside . . . among
the working people. These pamphlets were written almost
wholly by men of talent and of some standing in the world,
^ See the volumes of the Poor Man's Guardian, preserved in the
British Museum.
The Owenite Ideas 157
professional men, gentlemen, manufacturers, tradesmen, and
men called literary. The consequence was that a very large
proportion of the working people in England and Scotland
became persuaded that they had only to combine, as it was
concluded they might easily do, to compel not only a con-
siderable advance in wages all round, but employment for
every one, man and woman, who needed it, at short hours.
This notion induced them i6 form themselves into Trades
Unions in a manner and to an extent never before known." ^
This jumble of ordinary Trade Union aims and com-
munist aspirations, described from the hostile point of view
of a fanatical Malthusian and staunch believer in the
" Wage Fund," probably fairly represents the character
of the Owenite propaganda. It made an ineradicable
impression on the working-class leaders of that generation,
and inspired the great surge of soHdarity which rendered
possible the gigantic enhstments of the Grand National,
with its unprecedented regiments of agricultural labourers
and women. Its enlargement of consciousness of the
working class was no doubt a good in itself which no mistakes
in practical pohcy could wholly cancel. ^ But Owen did
1 Place MSS. 27797 — 290 ; see a similar accoiint in the Life of William
Lovett, by himself, p. 86. James Mill writes to Lord Brougham on Sep-
tember 3, 1832, as follows : " Nothing can be conceived more mischievous
than the doctrines which have been preached to the common people.
. . . The nonsense to which your lordship alludes about the right of the
labourer to the whole produce of the country, wages, profits, and rent
all included, is the mad nonsense of our friend Hodgskin, which he has
published as a system, and propagates with the zeal of perfect fanaticism.
. . . The ilhcit cheap pubhcations, in which the doctrine of the right of
the labouring people, who they say are the only producers, to all that is
produced, is very generally preached, ... are superseding the Sunday
newspapers and every other channel through which the people might get
better information" (Bain's James Mill, p. 363, 1882). The series of
Socialist authors of these years, usually ignored, have been well described
by Prof. Foxwell in his Introduction to the English translation of Menger's
Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899 ; and more fully and philosophic-
ally in M. Beer's History of British Socialism, 1919, vol. i.
^ "Owen's chief merit was that he filled the working classes with
renewed hope at a time when the pessimism, both of orthodox economists
and of their unorthodox opponents, had condemned labour to be an
appendage of machinery, a mere commodity whose value, like that of
all commodities, was determined by the bare cost of keeping up the
158 The Revolutionary Period
mischief as well as good ; and as both the evil and the good
live after him — for nothing that Owen did can yet be said
to be interred with his bones — it is necessary to examine
■^ his Trade Union doctrine in some detail. He was at his
'^'^ best when, as the experienced captain of industry, he
'^'^ denounced with fervent emphasis that lowering of the
.w Standard of Life which was the result of the creed of uni-
,^^^ versal competition. It was to combat this that he advocated
Factory Legislation, and promoted combinations "to fix
a maximum time and a minimum wages " ; and it was by
thus attempting to secure the workers' Standard of Life
by legislation and Trade Union action that he gained the
influential support, not only of philanthropists, but also of
certain high-minded manufacturers, with whose aid tie
formed in December 1833 the " Society for National
Regeneration," ^ to which we have already referred. The
most definite proposal of this society, the shortening of the
hours of labour to eight per day, was what led to that
suggestion of Fielden's on which the Lancashire cotton
operatives acted in their abortive general strike for an eight
hours day. It also produced the long series of " Short
Time Committees "in the textile towns whose persistent
agitation eventually secured the passing of the Ten Hours
Bill, itself only an instalment of our great Factory Code.
History has emphatically justified Owen on this side of his
labour policy.
But there was a Utopian side to it which acted more
necessary supply. Owen laid stress upon the human side of economics.
The object of industry was to produce happier and more contented men
and women " {The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918, fj.. 45).
^ The prospectus of this Society is in the British Library of Political
Science at the London School of Economics. A copy is given in the
Morning Chronicle, December 7, 1833. Its Manchester meetings are
reported in the Crisis for November and December 1833. It seems to
have had for its organ a penny weekly called The Herald of the Rights of
Industry, some numbers of which are in the British Museum. Professor
Foxwell has kindly drawn our attention to a further reference to it in the
Life of James Deacon Hume, p. 55. It excited the curiosity of the Home
Secretary. See Home Office Papers, 40 — 31.
i
Impracticable Ideals 159
questionably. The working-class world became, under
his influence, inflated with a premature conception and
committed to an impracticable working scheme of social
organisation. He proved himself an able thinker and
seer when he pointed out that the horrible poverty of the
time was a new economic phenomenon, the inevitable
result of unfettered competition and irresponsible individual
ownership of the means of production now that those
means had become enonnously expensive and yet compact
enough to employ hundreds of men under the orders of a
few, besides being so prodigiously efficient as to drive the
older methods quite out of the market. But from the point
of view of the practical statesman, it must be confessed
that he also showed himself something of a simpleton in
supposing, or at least assuming, that competition could be
aboHshed and ownership sociaUsed b\' organising voluntary
associations to supersede both the millowners and the State.
He had tried the experiment in America with the famous
community of New Harmony, and its failure had for the time
thoroughly disgusted him with communities. But his
disgust was not disillusion, for its only practical effect was
to set him to repeat the experiment with the Trade Unions.
Under his teaching the Trade Unionists came to beheve that
it was possible, by a universal non-political compact of the
wage-earners, apparently through a universal expropriatory
strike, to raise wages and shorten the hours of labour " to
an extent," as Place puts it, " which, at no very distant
time, would give them the whole proceeds of their labour."
The function of the brain-worker as the director of industry
was disregarded, possibly because in the cotton industry
(in which Owen had made a fortune) it plays but an insigni-
ficant part in the actual productive processes, and is mainly
concerned with that pursuit of cheap markets to buy in
and dear markets to sell in which formed no part of the
Utopian commonwealth at which " the Trades Union "
aimed. The existing capitahsts and managers were there-
fore considered as usurpers to be as soon as possible super-
i6o The Revolutionary Period
seded by the elected representatives of voluntary and
sectional associations of producers, in which it seems to
have been assumed all the brain- working . technicians would
be included. The modern Socialist proposal to substitute
the officials of the Municipality or State was unthinkable at
a period when all local governing bodies were notoriously
inefficient and corrupt and Parliament practically an
oligarchy. Under the system proposed by Owen the
instruments of production were to become the property,
not of the whole community, but of the particular set of
workers who used them. " There is no other alternative,"
he said, " than National Companies for each trade. . . .
Thus all those trades which relate to clothing shall form a
company — such as tailors, shoemakers, hatters, milUners,
and mantua-makers ; and all the different manufacturers
[i.e. operatives] shall be arranged in a similar way ; com-
munications shall pass from the various departments to the
Grand National estabUshment in London." In fact, the
Trade Unions were to be transformed into " national
companies " to carry on all the manufactures.^ The Agri-
cultural Union was to take possession of the land, the
Miners' Union of the mines, the Textile Unions of the fac-
tories. Each trade was to be carried on by its particular
Trade Union, centralised in one " Grand Lodge."
Of all Owen's attempts to reduce his Socialism to
practice this was certainly the very worst. For his short-
lived communities there was at least this excuse : that
within their own area they were to be perfectly homo-
geneous little Communist States. There were to be no
conflicting sections ; and profit-making and competition
were to be effectually eliminated. But in " the Trades
Union," as he conceived it, the mere combination of all the
workmen in a trade as co-operative producers no more
abolished commercial competition than a combination of
^ See Owen's elaborate speech, reported in the Crisis, October 12,
1833 ; Robert Given : a Biography, by Frank rodmore, 1906; and Trade
Unionism, by C. M. Lloyd, 1915.
" National Companies" i6i
all the employers in it as a Joint Stock Company. In effect
his Grand Lodges would have been simply the head offices
of huge Joint Stock Companies owning the entire means of
production in their industry, and subject to no control by
the community as a whole. They would therefore have
been in a position at any moment to close their ranks and
admit fresh generations of workers only as employees at
competitive wages instead of as shareholders, thus creating
at one stroke a new capitalist class and a new proletariat.
Further, the improvident shareholders would soon have
begun to sell their shares in order to spend tl\eir capital,
and thus to drop with their children into the new proletariat ;
whilst the enterprising and capable shareholders would
equally have sold their shares to buy into other and momen-
tarily more profitable trades. Thus there would have been
not only a capitalist class and proletariat, but a speculative
stock market. Finally there would have come a competi-
tive struggle between the Joint Stock Unions to supplant
one another in the various departments of industry. Thus
the shipwrights, making wooden ships, would have found the
boilermakers competing for their business by making iron
ships, and would have had either to succumb or to trans-
form their wooden ship capital into iron ship capital and
enter into competition with the boilermakers as commercial
rivals in the same trade. This difficulty was staring Owen
in the face when he entered the Trade Union Movement ;
for the trades, then as now, were in continual perplexity
as to the exact boundaries between them ; for example,
the minute-books of the newly formed Joiners' Society in
Glasgow (whose secretary was a leading Owenite) show
that its great difficulty was the demarcation of its trade
against the cabinetmaker and the engineer-patternmaker,
each of whom claimed certain technical operations as proper
to himself alone. In short, the Socialism of Owen led him
to propose a practical scheme which was not even socialistic,
and which, if it could possibly have been carried out, would
have simply arbitrarily redistributed the capital of the
G
i62 The Revolutionary Period
country witliout altering or superseding tlie capitalist
system in tlie least.
All this will be so obvious to those who comprehend
our capitalist sj^stem that they will have some difficulty
in believing that it could have escaped so clever a man
and so experienced and successful a capitalist as Owen.
How far he made it a rule to deliberatel}' shut his eyes to
the difficulties that met him, from a burning conviction
that any change was better than leaving matters entirely
alone, cannot even be guessed ; but it is quite certain that
he acted in perfect good faith, simply not knowing thoroughly
what he was about. He had a boundless beUef in the power
of education to form character ; and if any scheme promised
just sufficient respite from poverty and degradation to
enable him and his disciples to educate one generation of
the country's children, he was ready to leave all economic
consequences to be dealt with by " the New Moral World "
which that generation's Owenite schooling would have
created. Doubtless he thought that " the Trades Union "
promised him this much ; and besides, he did not foresee
its economic consequences. He was disabled by that
confident sciolism and prejudice which has led generations
of Socialists to borrow from Adam Smith and the " classic "
economists the erroneous theory that labour is by itself
the creator of value, without going on to master that
impregnable and more difficult law of economic rent which
is the very corner-stone of collecrtivist economy. He took
his economics from his friend William Thompson,^ who, like
Hodgskin and Hodgskin's illustrious disciple, Karl Mar.x,
ignored the law of rent in his calculations, and taught that
all exchange values could be measured in terms of " labour
* Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most con-
ducive to Human Happiness, by William Thompson, 1824 ; also his Labour
Rewarded, the Claims of Labour and Capital : Hoiv to secure to Labour the
xvhole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes, 1827 ; see }*ro-
frssor I'oxwell's Introduction to The Ifight to the whole Produce of Labour,
liy Anton Mender, iSqq; History of British Socialism, by M. IJcer, 1919,
\ol. i. ; and The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919, ch. iiL
The Nature of Value 163
time " alone. Part of the Owenite activity of the time
actually resulted in the opening of labour bazaars, in which
the prices were fixed in minutes. The fact that it is the
consumer's demand which gives to the product of labour
any exchange-value at all, and that the extent and elasticity
of this demand determines how much has to be produced ;
and the other governing consideration, namely, that the
expenditure of labour required to bring articles of the same
desirabihty to market varies enormously according to
natural differences in fertility of soil, distance to be traversed,
proximity to good highways, waterways, or ports, accessi-
bihty of water-power or steam fuel, and a hundred other
circumstances, including the organising abiUty and execu-
tive dexterity of the producer, found themselves left entirely
out of account. Owen assumed that the labour of the miner
and that of the agricultural labourer, whatever the amount
and nature of the product of each of them, would spontan-
eously and continuously exchange ^^ith each other equitabh-
at par of hours and minutes when the miners had received a
monopoly of the bowels of the country, and the agricultural
labourers of its skin. He did not even foresee that the
Miners' Union might be inchned to close its ranks against
newcomers from the farm labourers, or that the Agricultural
Union might refuse to cede sites for the Builders' Union to
work upon. In short, the difficult economic problem of
the equitable sharing of the advantages of superior sites
and opportunities never so much as occurred to the en-
thusiastic Owenite economists of this period.
One question, and that the most immediately important
of all, was never seriously faced : How was the transfer
of the industries from the capitahsts to the Unions to be
effected in the teeth of a hostile and well-armed Govern-
ment ? The answer must have been that the overwhelming
numbers of " the Trades Union " would render conflict
impossible. His enthusiastic disciple, \Mlliam Benbow, suc-
cessively a shoemaker, bookseller, and coffee-house keeper,
invented the instrument of the General Strike — a sacred
164 The Revolutionary Period
" holiday month " prepared for and participated in by the
entire wage-earning class, the mere " passive resistance " of
which would, without violence or conflict, bring down all
existing institutions. Whether this was in Owen's mind
in 1834, ^s it was, in 1839, avowedly in those of the
Chartists, is uncertain. ^ At all events, Owen, like the early
Christians, habitually spoke as if the Day of Judgment of
the existing order of society was at hand. The next six
months, in his view, were always going to see the " New
Moral World " really established. The change from the
capitalist system to a complete organisation of industry
under voluntary associations of producers was to " come
suddenly upon society like a thief in the night." " One
year," comments his disciple, " may disorganise the whole
fabric of the old world, and transfer, by a sudden spring,
the whole political government of the country from the
master to the servant." ^ It is impossible not to regret
that the first introduction of the English Trade Unionist to
Socialism should have been effected by a foredoomed scheme
which violated every economic principle of Collectivism,
and left the indispensable political preliminaries to pure
chance.
It was under the influence of these large plans and
confident hopes that the Trade Unions were emboldened to
adopt the haughty attitude and contemptuous language
towards the masters which provoked Manchester and
Liverpool employers to meet the challenge of the Builders'
Union by " the Document." The " intolerable tyranny "
of the Unions, so much harped on by contemporary writers,
represents, to a large extent, nothing more than the rather
^ The pamphlet, entitled The Grand National Holiday and Congress oj
the Productive Classes, by William Benbow, 1831, had an extensive circu-
lation. Mark Hovell {The Chartist Movement, 1918, p. 91) thinks he was
the same William Benbow whom Bamford mentions as a delegate frt)rn
Manchester in 1817 (Life of a liadical, p. S), and whom Henry Hunt
describes as of the Manchester Hami)den Club, and as having been re-
ported by a Government spy to be manufacturing pikes in iSi6 (2'h«
Green Hag Plot, 191 8).
* Leading article in the Crisis, October 12, 1833.
J
Why the Unions were Insolent 165
bumptious expression of the Trade Unionists' feeling that
they were the rightful directors of industry, entitled to choose
the processes, and select their fellow-workers, and even their
managers and foremen. And it must be remembered that
this occurred at a period when class prejudice was so strong
that any attempt at a parley made by the workers, however
respectfully, was regarded as presumptuous and unbecoming.
Hence the working class had always too much reason to
believe that civihty on their part would be thrown away.
It is certain that during the Owenite intoxication the
impracticable expectations of national dominion on the
part of the wage-earners were met with an equally unreason-
able determination by the governing classes to keep the
working men in a state not merely of subjection, but of
abject submission. The continued exclusion of the work-
men from the franchise made constitutional action on their
side impossible. The employers, on the other hand, used
their pohtical and magisterial power against the men
without scruple, inciting a willing Government to attack
the workmen's combinations by every possible perversion
of the law, and partiality in its administration. Regarding
absolute control over the conduct of their workpeople as a
sine qua non of industrial organisation, even the genuine
philanthropists among them insisted on despotic authority
in the factory or workshop. Against the abuse of this
authority there w^as practically no guarantee. On the
other side it can be shown that large sections of the wage-
earners were not only moderate in their demands, but
submissive in their behaviour. As a rule, where\er we find
exceptional aggression and violence on the part of the
operatives, we discover exceptional tyranny on the side of
the employers. To give an example or two, the continual
outrages which disgrace the annals of Glasgow Trade Union-
ism for the first forty years of this century are accounted
for by the reports of the various Parhamentary Inquiries
which mark out the Glasgow millowners as extraordinarily
autocratic in their views and tyrannous in their conduct.
i66 The Revolutionary Period
Again, the aggressive conduct of certain sections of the
building trades is frequently complained of in the capitalist
press between 1830-40. But the agreements which the
large contractors of that time required " all those to sign
who enter into their employ," printed copies of which are
still extant, show that the demands of the employers were
intolerably arbitrary.^ Then there is the case of the miners
of Great Britain, who were in very ill repute for riotous
proceedings from 1837-44. The provocation they received
may be judged from a manifesto issued by Lord London-
derry in his dual capacity as mine-owner and Lord- Lieu-
tenant of Durham County during the great strike of the
miners in 1844 for fairer terms of hiring. He not only
superintends, as Lord-Lieutenant, the wholesale eviction of
the strikers from their homes, and their supersession by
Irishmen specially imported from his Irish estates, but he
peremptorily orders the resident traders in " his town of
Seaham," on pain of forfeiting his custom and protection,
to refuse to supply provisions to the workmen engaged in
what he deems " an unjust and senseless warfare against
tJieir proprietors and masters." ^ The same intolerance
> A specimen dated 1837 is preserved by the Stonemasons' Society,
according to wliich a Liverpool contractor bound all his employees to
serve him at a fixed wage for a long term of years, any time lost by sick-
ness or otherwise not to be paid for and to be added to the term ; all
" lawful commands " to be obeyed ; and no present or future club or
other society to be joined without the employer's consent.
* See his manifestoes reprinted in Northern Star, July 6 and July 27,
1844. " Lord Londonderry again warns all the shopkeepers and tradts-
inen in his town of Seaham that if they still give credit to pitmen who
hold olf work, and continue in the Union, such men will be marked by
his agents ;ind overmen, and will never be employed in his collieries again,
and the shopkeepers may be assured that they will never have any custom
or dealings with them from Lord Londonderry's large concerns that he
can in any manner ])revent.
" Lord Londonderry further informs the traders and shopkeepers,
that having by his measures increased very largely the last year's trade
to Seaham, and if credit is so improperly and so fatally given to his
unreasonable pitmen, thereby prolonging the injurious strike, it is his
hrm determination to carry back all tiie outlay of his concerns even to
Newcastle.
" Because it is neither fair, just, or equitable that the resident traders
in Itis own town should combine and assist the infatuated workmen and
!
The Close of Owenism 167
marks the magazines and journals of the dominant classes
of the period. It seems to have been habitually taken for
granted that the workman had not merely to fulfil his
contract of service, but to yield implicit obedience in the
details of his working Hfe to the will of his master. Com-
binations and strikes on the part of the " lower orders "
were regarded as futile and disorderly attempts to escape
from their natural position of social subservience. In
short, the majority of emplo^^ers, even in this time of negro
emancipation, seem to have been unconsciously acting upon
the dictum subsequently attributed to J. C. Calhoun, the
defender of American slavery, that " the true solution of
the contest of all time between labour and capital is that
capital should own the labourer whether white or black."
The closing scene of Owen's first and last attempt at
" the Trades Union " shows how ephemeral had been his
participation in the real life of the Trade Union Movement.
In August 1834 he called together one of his usual mis-
cellaneous congresses, consisting of delegates from all kinds
of Owenite societies, with a few from the Grand National
and other Trade Unions. At this congress the " Grand
National Consolidated Trades Union," which was to have
brought to its feet Government, landlords, and employers,
was formally converted into the " British and Foreign
Consohdated Association of Industry, Humanity, and
Knowledge," having for its aim the establishment of a
" New Moral World " by the reconciliation of all classes.
Beyond one or two small and futile experiments in
co-operative production, it had attempted nothing to
realise Owen's Utopia. Its whole powers had been spent,
seemingly with his own consent, in a series of aggressive
strikes. For all that, Owen's meteoric appearance in the
Trade Union World left a deep impression on the movement.
The minute-books and other contemporary records of the
Trade Unions of the next decade abound in Owenite
pitmen in prolonging their own miseries by continuing an insane strike,
and an unjust and senseless warfare against their proprietors and masters."
i68 The Revolutionary Period
phraseology, such as the classification of Society into the
" idle " and the " industrious " classes, the latter apparently
meaning — and being certainly understood to mean — only
the manual workers. More important is the persistence of
the idea that the Trade Unions, as Associations of Producers,
should recover control of the instruments of production.
From this time forth innumerable attempts were made, by
one Trade Union or another, to employ its own members
in Productive Co-operation. A long series of industrial
disasters, culminating in the great losses of 1874, has, even
now, scarcely eradicated the last remnant of this Joint Stock
Individualism from the idealists of the Trade Union Move-
ment ; or taught them to distinguish accurately between
it and the demonstrably successful Co-operative Production
of the Associations of Consumers which constitute the
Co-operative Movement of to-day. Outside the organised
ranks his effect upon general working-class opinion was, as
Place remarks, enormous, as we could abundantly show
were we here concerned with the " Union Shops," " Equit-
able Labour Exchanges," and industrial communities
which may be considered the most direct result of the
Owenite propaganda, or with the fortunes of the innumer-
able co-operative associations of producers, whose delegates
formed the backbone of the Owenite congresses of these
years. ^
The Trade Union Movement was not absolutely left for
dead when Owen quitted the field. The skilled mechartics
of the printing and engineering trades had, as we shall
presently see, held aloof from the general movement, and
their trade clubs were unaffected either by the Owenite
boom or its subsequent collapse. In some other trades the
inflation of 1830-4 spread itself over a few more years. The
Potters' Union went on increasing in strength, and in 1835
gained a notable victory over the cmploj'ers, when a " Green
Book of Prices " was agreed to, which long remained famous
* Some account of these developments will be found in The Co-operativi
Movenunt in Great Britain, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb).
The Survival of Trade Unionism 169
in the trade. Renewed demands led to the formation bj^
the employers of a Chamber of Commerce to resist the men's
aggression. The " yearly bond " was rigidly insisted upon,
and a great strike ensued, which ended in 1837 iii the
complete collapse of the Union. ^ In 1836 the Scottish
compositors formed the General Typographical Association
of Scotland, which for a few years exercised an effective
control over the trade. The same year saw a notable strike
by the Preston Cotton-spinners, from which is dated the
general adoption of the self-acting mule.^ But the most
permanent effect is seen in the building trades. The
national Unions of Plumbers and Carpenters have preserve^
an unbroken existence down to the present day,^ whilst
the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons remained
for nearly another half century one of the most powerful of
English Unions. The fortnightly circulars of the English
Stonemasons reveal, for a few years, not only a vigorous
life and quick growth, but also man}^ successful short strikes
to secure Working Rules and to maintain Time Wages.
The Scottish Stonemasons are referred to as being even
more active and influential in trade regulation, and as having
included practically all the Scottish masons. There is evi-
dence, too, of informal federal action between the National
Unions of Stonemasons, Carpenters, and Bricklayers.
Unfortunately the absence of such modern machinery of
organisation as Trades Councils, Trade Union Congresses,
^ The collapse was duly reported to the Home Secretary (Home Office
Papers, 40 — 33, 34, 35).
2 See Ashworth's paper before British Association, 1837 ; Remarks
upon the Importance of an Inquiry into the Amount and Appropriation of
Wages by the Working Classes, by W. Felkin, 1837 ; Appeal to the Public
from the United Trades of Preston, February 14, 1837 (in Home Office
Papers, 40 — 35).
^ The United Society of Operative Plumbers (reorganised 1848) still
dominates its branch of the trade, and retains traces of the federal con-
stitution of the Builders' Union. The sister organisation of carpenters
(now styled the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners) has been over-
taken and overshadowed by the newer Amalgamated Society of Carpenters
and Joiners ; whilst the Operative Bricklayers' Society has absorbed
practically all the older societies in its own branch of the trade.
G 2
170 The Revolutionary Period
and standing joint committees prevented the scattered
sectional organisations from forming any general movement.
This state of things was broken into during the year 1837
by the sensational strikes in Glasgow, the prolonged legal
prosecution and severe punishment of their leaders, and the
appointment of a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into
the results of the repeal of the Combination Laws.
■ We do not propose to enter here into the details of the
fartious trial of the five Glasgow cotton-spinners for con-
spiracy, violent intimidation, and for the murder of fellow-
workers. But it is one of the " leading cases " of Trade
Union history, and the manifestations of feehng which it
provoked show to the depths the state of mind of the
working classes. ^ The evidence given in court, and repeated
before the Select Committee of 1838, leaves no reasonable
doubt that the Cotton-Spinners' Union in its corporate
capacity had initiated a reign of terror extending over
twenty years, and that some of the incriminated members
had been personally guilty not of instigation alone, but of
actual violence, if not of murder. In spite of this, the whole
body of working-class opinion was on their side, and the
^ Glasgow was still the principal centre of the cotton industry, especi-
ally in weaving. In 1838 there were in the Glasgow area about 36,000
handlooms devoted mainly to cotton, with two persons to a loom, whilst
in all Lancashire there were only 25,000 (Parliamentary Papers, xlii.
of 1849 and xxiv. of 1840 ; The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918,
p. 14). Combination among the cotton operatives of Glasgow was of old
standing. After the strike of 1812, already referred to, trouble' broke
out again in 1820 and 1822, when outrages were committed {Arts and
Artisans, by J. G. Symons, 1839, p. 137).
Besides securing full reports in the newspapers, the Trade Union
committee conducting the case published at a low price an account of
the trial in parts, which has not been preserved. Two other exhaustive
reports were issued, and may still be consulted, viz. Report of the trial oj
Thomas Hunter and other operative cotton-spinners in Glasgow in 183S, by
Archibald Swinton (Edinburgh, 1838), and The trial of Thomas Hunter, etc.,
the Glasgow Colton-spinners, by James Marshall (Glasgow, 1838). See also
the Autobiography of Sir Archibald Alison, 1883; the Northern Star for
1837-8; the Annual Register for 1838, pp. 206-7; and the evidence
before the Select Committee on Combinations, 1838. A summary will
be found in Howell's Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour
Leaders, 1902. pp. 83-4.
The Glasgow Spinners 171
sentence of seven years' transportation was received with as
much indignation as that upon the Dorchester labourers
four years before. This was one of the natural effects of
the class despotism and scarcely veiled rebelhon which we
have already described. The use of violence by working
men, either against obnoxious employers or against traitors
in their own ranks, was regarded in much the same way
as the political offences of a subject race under foreign
dominion. Such deeds did not, in fact, necessarily indicate
any moral turpitude on the part of the perpetrators. No
one accused the five Glasgow cotton-spinners of bad private
character or conduct, and at least four out of the five were
men of acknowledged integrity and devotedness.i Their
unjust treatment whilst awaiting trial, and still more
their sentence to transportation, enhsted the sympathy of
the Parhamentary Radicals, and Wakley, the member for
Finsbury, did not hesitate to bring their case before the
House of Commons as one of legal persecution and injustice.
At this time the trade societies of Dubhn and Cork had
caused serious complaint by attempting to estabhsh, and
not without violence, an effective monopoly in certain
skilled industries. Their action had been reproved by
Daniel O'Connell, whom they, in their turn, had repudiated
and denounced. O'Connell defeated Wakley's friendly
motion for an inquiry into the cotton-spinners' case by
a serious indictment of Trade Unionism. By a clever
analysis of the rules of the Irish societies, which he made
out to be purely obstructive and selfish, he condemned, in
a speech of great power, all attempts on the part of trade
combinations to regulate the conditions of labour. The
well-estabhshed methods of modern Trade Unionism, such
as the maintenance of a minimum rate, received from him
the same condemnation as the unsocial and oppressive
* The five prisoners were pardoned in 1840, in consequence of their
exemplary conduct. There is a joint letter by them in the Trades Journal
for August, 1840, relating to the subscriptions raised for them by a
London committee.
172 The Revolutionary Period
monopolies for which the Irish trades had long been
notorious. The Government met this speech by granting
a Select Committee under Sir Henry Parnell to inquire
into the whole question ; and Trade Unionism accordingly
found itself once more on its defence as a permanent element
in social organisation. The case of the Glasgow cotton-
spinners and the appointment of this Parhamentary Com-
mittee for the moment revived the sentiment of solidarity
in the Trade Union world. A joint committee of the
Glasgow trades was formed to collect subscriptions for
the defence of the prisoners ; and communications for
this purpose were made to all the known Trade Unions.
Considerable funds were , subscribed, as the trial was
repeatedly postponed at great expense to the prisoners ;
and when at last, in January, 1838, they were convicted
and sentenced, a combined agitation for some mitigation
of their punishment was begun. By this time it had become
known that some kind of inquiry into Trade Unionism was
in contemplation. The Unions at once set their house in
order. The Stonemasons, who had already given up the
administration of oaths, resolved, for greater security against
illegal practices, " that all forms of regaha, initiation, and
passwords be dispensed with and entirely abolished." ^
The Dublin Plasterers formally suspended their exclusive
rules, and deferred the issue of a new edition until after
the inquiry. 2 In Glasgow, the chief seat of the disorder,
many societies — among others, the local Carpenters —
dehberately burned their minute-books and archives for
the past year. The London societies appointed a com-
mittee, " The Lonldon Trades Combination Committee,"
to conduct the Unionist case in the Parliamentary inquiry.
Lovett, then well known as a Radical politician, became
secretary, and issued a stirring address to the Trade Unions
throughout the country, asking for subscriptions and cvi-
' Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular, January ly, 1S38.
* Evidence of \V. Darcy, the secretary, second report of 1838 Com-
mittee, p. 130.
The Parliamentary Inquiry 173
dence.^ But the Parliamentary Committee proved both
perfunctory and inconclusive. The Government, which
had conceded it merely to rid itself of the importunity of
Wakley on the one hand and O'Connell on the other, had
evidently no intention of taking any action on the subject ;
and the Committee, always thinly attended, made no attempt
at a general inquiry, and confined itself practically to Dublin
and Glasgow. O'Connell got the opportunity he desired
of demonstrating, through selected witnesses, the violent
and exclusive spirit which animated the Irish Unions. With
regard to Glasgow, the chief witness was Sheriff, afterwards
Sir Archibald, Alison, whose vigorous action had quelled
the cotton-spinners in that city. It was scarcely necessary
to call witnesses on behalf of the Unions ; but John Doherty,
then become a master-printer and bookseller, was allowed
to describe the Manchester spinners' organisation and the
ill-fated associations of 1829-31. The inquiry resulted
in nothing but the presentation to the House of two
volumes of evidence, without even so much as a report.
It seems to have been expected that the Committee would
be reappointed to complete its task ; but when the next
session came the matter was quietly dropped. -
The temporary fillip given by the cotton-spinners' trial
and the Parhamentary Committee did not stop the steady
decline of Trade Unionism throughout the country. Trade,
which had been on the wane since 1836, grew suddenly
worse. The decade closed with three of the leanest years
ever known ; and widespread distress prevailed. The
membership of the surviving Trade Unions rapidly de-
creased. The English Stonemasons, perhaps the strongest
^ Circular dated March i, 1838, in Stonemasons' archives ; and An
Address from the London Trades Committee appointed to watch the Parlia-
mentary Inquiry into Combinations, 1838.
2 George Howell suggests, we are not sure with what authority, that
Nassau Senior, whose report on Trade Unionism to the Home Secretary
in 1830 we have already described, tendered this to Sir Henry Parnell as
the basis of a report by the Committee of 1S38, but the proposal was
not accepted {Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders,
1902, pp. 83-4). See also The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
174 The Revolutionary Period
of the contemporary societies, reduced themselves, in 1841,
temporarily, to absolute bankruptcy by their disastrous
strike against an obnoxious foreman on the rebuilding of
the Houses of Parliament. The Scottish Stonemasons'
Society, of equal or greater strength, collapsed at about
the same time, from causes not known to us. The Glasgow
trades had been completely disorganised by the disasters
of 1837. The Lancashire textile operatives showed no sign
of life ; whilst such growing societies as the Ironfounders,
the Journeymen Steam-Engine Makers and Millwrights,
and the Boilermakers were crippled by the heavy drafts
made upon their funds by unemployed members. The
state of mind of the working classes was no more propitious
than the state of trade. Fierce discontent and sullen anger
are the characteristics of this period Hatred of the New
Poor Law, of the iniquitous taxes on food,, of the general
oppression by the dominant classes, blazes out in the Trade
Union records of the time. The agitation for the " Six
Points," set on foot by Lovett and others in the Working
Men's Association of 1836, became the centre of woiking-
class aspiration. The Northern Star, started at the end
of 1837, rapidly distanced all other provincial journals in
circulation. The lecturers of the Anti-Corn Law League
increased the popular discontent, even when their own
particular panJicea failed to find acceptance. A general
despair of conr^titutional reform led to the growing supre-
macy of the " Physical Force " .section of the Chartists,
and to the insurrcctionism of 1839-42.
The political developments of these years are outside
the scope of thi^ work. The Chartist Movement plays
the most important part in working-class annals from
1837 to 1842, and docs not quit the stage until 1848.
Made respectable by sincerity, devotion, and even heroism
in the rank and iile, it was disgraced by the fustian of
many of its orators and the iK)litical and economic quacker}'
of its pretentious and incompetent leaders whose jealousies
and intrigues, by successively excluding all the nobler
The Chartist Strikes < 175
elements, finally brought it to nought. An adequate history
of it would be of extreme value to our young Democracy.^
Here it is only necessary to say that whilst the Chartist
Movement commanded the support of the vast majority
of the manual-working wage-earners, outside the ranks of
those who were deeply religious, there is no reason to believe
that the Trade Unions at any time became part and parcel
of the Movement, as they had, during 1833-4, of the Owenite
agitation, though some of their members furnished the most
ardent supporters of the Charter. Individual trades, such
as the shoemakers, seem to have been thoroughly permeated
with Chartism, and were always attempting to rally other
trade societies to the cause. The angry strikes of 1842 in
Lancashire and the Midlands, fostered, as some said, by
the Anti-Corn Law League, were " captured " by the
Chartists, and almost converted into pohtical rebellions.
The delegate meeting of the Lancashire and Yorkshire trade
clubs, which was conducting the " general strike " then in
progress " for the wages of 1840," resolved in August 1842
to recommend all wage-earners " to cease work until the
Charter becomes the law of the land." ^ For a few weeks,
indeed, it looked as if the Trade Union Movement, such as
it was, would become merged in the political current. But
the manifest absurdity of persuading starving men to
remain on strike until the whole political machinery of the
country had been altered, must have quickly become
apparent to the shrewder Trade Unionists. When Chartist
^ A series of subsequent publications has now gone far to fill this gap.
The Chartist Movement, by R. G. Gammage (republished 1894), may
now be supplemented by The Life of Francis Place, by Professor Graham
Wallas (revised edition, 1918) ; Le Chartisme, 1830-4S, by E. Dolleans,
2 vols. (Paris, 1912-13) ; The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, 1918;
The Social and Economic Aspects of the Chartist Movement, by F. F.
Rosenblatt (New York, 1916) ; The Decline of the Chartist Movement, by
P. W. Slosson (New York, 1916) ; Chartism and the Churches, by H. V.
Faulkner (New York, 1916) ; Die Entstehitng ttnd die okonomischen Griind-
sdtze der Chartistenhewegung, by John Tildsley (Jena, 1898) ; and especi-
ally by the two separate volumes on the History of British Socialism,
by M. Beer, 1919 and 1920.
2 Northern Star, August 20, 1842.
176 - The Revolutionary Period
meetings at Sheffield were calling for a " general strike "
to obtain the Charter, the secretaries of seven local Unions
wrote to the newspapers explaining that their trades had
nothing to do with the meetings or the resolutions.^ It must
be remembered in this connection that the number of Trade
Unionists was, in these years, relatively small — probably
not so great as a hundred thousand in the whole kingdom
— so that they could not have formed any appreciable pro-
portion of the two, three or four million adherents that the
Chartist leaders were in the habit of claiming. And it
may be doubted whether in any case a Trade Union itself,
as distinguished from particular members who happened
to be delegates, made any formal profession of adherence
to Chartism. In the contemporary Trade Union records
that are still extant, such as those of the Bookbinders,
Compositors, Ironfounders, Cotton-spinners, Steam-engine
makers, and Stonemasons, there are no traces of Chartist
resolutions ; although denunciations of the " Notorious
New Poor Law oppression " abound in the Fortnightly
Circular of the Stonemasons ; '^ whilst the Ironfounders,
Compositors, and Cotton-spinners pass resolutions in favour
of Free Trade. A partial explanation of this reticence on
the more exciting topic of the Charter is doubtless to be
found in the frequently adopted rule excluding politics
and religion from Trade Union discussions — a rule which
was, in 1842, protested against by an enthusiastic Chartist
delegate from the Bookbinders at the Manchester Con-
ference.^ There must, however, have been sometliing more
than mere obedience to the rule in the unwillingness of tlic
trade societies to be mixed up with the Chartist agitation.
The rule had not prevented the organised trades of 1831-2
' Sheffield Iris, August 1842.
* See, for instance, tliat for October 1831).
" Northern Star, August 20, i8.fi. " It is clear that the trade societies
as a wliole stood outside tlie Chartist Movement, thouyh many Trade
Unionists were no doubt Chartists loo. The societies could not be in-
duced to imperil their funds and e.xistence at the orders of the Chartist
Convention " (The Chartist Movement, by Mark Hovell, lyib, p. i6y).
The Trade Union Refusal 177
from taking a prominent part in the Reform Bill Movement.
The banners of the Edinburgh trade clubs were conspicuous
in the public demonstration on the rejection of the Bill of
1 83 1. When the House of Lords gave way, the Birmingham
Trade Unions themselves organised a triumphal procession,
which was discountenanced by the middle class.^ The
records of the London Brushmakers show that they even
subscribed from the Union funds to Reform associations.
But we never find the trade societies of 1839-42 contributing
to Chartist funds, or even collecting money for Chartist
victims. The cases of Frost, Williams, and Jones, the
Newport rebels of 1839, were at least as deserving of the
working-class sympathy as those of the Glasgow cotton-
spinners. But the Trade Unions showed no inclination
to subscribe money or get up petitions in aid of them,
" Never," writes Fergus O'Connor, in 1846, " was there more
criminal apathy than that manifested by the trades of Great
Britain to the sufferings of those men ; " and he adds, " that
if one half that was done for the Dorchester labourers or
the Glasgow cotton-spinners had been done for Frost,
Williams, and Jones, they would long since have been
restored." ^
Insurrectionism, whether Owenite or Chartist, was, in
fact, losing its attraction for the working-class mind.
Robert Owen's economic axioms of the extinction of profit
and the elimination of the profit-maker were, during these
very years, passing into the new Co-operative Movement,
inaugurated in 1844 by the Rochdale Pioneers. The
believers in a " new system of society," to be brought
about by universal agreement, were henceforth to be found
in the ranks of the commercial-minded Co-operators rather
than in those of the militant Trade Unionists. Chartism,
meanwhile, had degenerated from Lovett's high ideal of a
complete political democracy to an ignoble scramble for the
1 History of Birmingham, by W. Hutton (Birmingham, edition of
1835). p. 149.
* Northern Star, August 24, 1846.
178 The Revolutionary Period
ownership of small plots of land. The example of the
French Revolution of 184(8 fanned the dying embers for
a few weeks into a new flame ; and many of the London
trades swung into the somewhat theatrical fete of April 10,
1848, swelling the procession against which the Duke of
'Wellington had marshalled the London middle class. But
the danger of revolution had passed awa^^ A new genera-
tion of workmen was growing up, to whom the worst of
the old oppression was unknown, and who had imbibed
the economic and political philosophy of the middle -class
reformers. Bentham, Ricardo, and Grote were read only
by a few ; but the activity of such popular educationalists
as Lord Brougham and Charles Knight propagated " useful
knowledge " to all the members of the Mechanics' Institutes
and the readers of the Penny Magazitie. The middle-class
ideas of " free enterprise " and " unrestricted competition "
which were thus diffused received a great impetus from the
extraordinary propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League,
and the general progress of Free Trade. Fergus O'Connor
and Bronterre O'Brien struggled in vain against the growing
dominance of Cobden and Bright as leaders of working-
class opinion. And so we find in the Trade Union records
of 1847-8, that vigorous resistance begins to be made to
any movement in support of the old ideals. The Steam-
Engine Makers' Society suspended some of their branches
for depositing the branch funds in Fergus O'Connor's Land
Bank. When two branches of the Stonemasons' Society
propose the same investment, the others indignantly pro-
test against it as an absurd political speculation. And it
is signilicant that these protests came, not from the cautious
elders whose enthusiasm had outlived many failures, but
from those who had never shared the old faith. When
in 1848 the Yorkshire Woolstaplers proposed to take a
farm upon which to set to work their unemployed men, it
was the younger members, as we are expressly told, who
strenuously but vainly resisted this action, which resulted
ruinously for the society.
The End of Insurrectionism 179
All this makes the close of the " revolutionary " period
of the Trade Union Movement. For the next quarter of
a century we shall watch the development of the new
ideas and the gradual building up of the great " amalga-
mated " societies of skilled artisans, with their centraHsed
administration, friendly society benefits, and the substitu-
tion, wherever possible, of Industrial Diplomacy for the
ruder methods of the Class War.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW SPIRIT AND THE NEW MODEL
[1843-1860]
We have seen the magnificent hopes of 1829-42 ending
in bitter disillusionment : we shall now see the Trade
Unionists of the next generation largely successful in
reaching their more limited aims. Laying aside all projects
of Social Revolution, they set themselves resolutely to resist
the worst of the legal and industrial oppressions from which
they suffered, and slowly built up for this purpose organisa-
tions which have become integral parts of the structure of
a modern industrial state. This success we attribute mainly
to the spread of education among the rank and file, and the
more practical counsels which began, after 1842, to influence
the Trade Union world. But we must not overlook the
effect of economic changes. The period between 1825
and 1848 was remarkable for the frequency and acuteness
of its commercial depressions. From 1850 industrial
expansion was for many years both greater and steadier
than in any previous period. ^ It is no mere coincidence
^ Between 1850 and 1874 there was (except, perhaps, during the
American Civil War) no falhng off in the vahie of our export trade com-
parable to the serious declines of 1826, 1829, 1837, 1842, and 1848. We
do not pretend to account for this difference, but may remind the reader
of the coincident increase in the production of gold, the inrtuence of Free
Trade and railways, and, as the binietallists would tell us. the currency
arrangements which were brought to an end in 1873.
180
Revival of Trade Unionism i8i
that these yezxs of prosperity saw the adoption by the
Trade Union world of a " New Model " of organisation,
under which Trade Unionism obtained a financial strength,
a trained staff of salaried officers, and a permanence of
membership hitherto unknown.
The predominance of Chartism over Trade Unionism
was confined to the bad times of 1837-42. Under the
influence of the rapid improvement and comparative pro-
sperity which followed, the Chartist agitation dwindled
away ; and a marked revival in Trade Unionism took
effect in the re-establishment, about 1843, of the Potters'
Union, and of an active Cotton - spinners' Association,
and, in 1845, by the amalgamation of the metropolitan
and provincial societies of compositors into the National
Typographical Society.^ The powerful United Flint Glass
Makers' Society (reorganised in 1849 as the Flint Glass
Makers' Friendly Society of Great Britain and Ireland)
dates from the same year Delegate meetings of other
trades were held ; and national societies of tailors and
shoemakers were set on foot. A national conference of
curriers in 1845 estabHshed a federal union of all the local
clubs in the trade. But the most important of the new
bodies was the Miners' Association of Great Britain and
Ireland, formed at Wakefield in 1841.2 Up to this period
the miners, held in virtual serfage by the truck system and
the custom of yearly hirings, had not got beyond ephemeral
strike organisations. Strong county Unions now grew up in
^ This was an elaborate national organisation with 60 branches,
grouped under five District Boards. But it enrolled only 4320 members,
and broke up in 1847, after numerous local strikes. In June 1849 most
of the provincial branches joined in the Typographical Association, from
which for some time the strong Manchester and Birmingham societies
stood aloof ; whilst the London men formed the London Society of
Compositors.
2 The Colliers' Guide, showing the Necessity of the Colliers Uniting to
Protect their Labour from the Iron Hand of Oppression, etc., by J. B.
Thompson (Bishop Wearmouth, 1843) ; and see many reports in the
Northern Star, from 1843 to 1848 ; The Miners of Northumberland and
Durham, by Richard Fynes, 1873 ; A Great Labour Leader [Thomas Burt],
by Aaron Watson, 1908, pp. 19-23.
1 82 The New Spirit and the New Model
Northuinberland and Durliam on tho one hand, and Lanca-
shire and Yorkshire on tlic otlicr ; and the new body was
a federation of tlicse. Under the leadership of Martin
Jude, it developed an extraordinary propagandist activity,
at one time paying no fewer than fifty-three missionary
organisers, who visited every coalpit in the kingdom. The
delegate meetings at Manchester and (ilasgow ip the year
1844 soon came to represent practically the whole of the
mining districts of Great Britain; and the membership
rose, it is said, to at least 100,000.^
A leading feature of this Trade Unionist revival was a
dogged resistance to legal oppression. Although the more
sensational prosecutions of Trade Union leadeis had ceased
with the abandonment of unlawful oaths, there was still
going on, up and down the kingdom, an almost continuous
persecution of the rank and file, by the magistrates' inter-
pretation of the law relating to masters and servants. The
miners, in particular, were hampered by lengthy hirings,
during which they were compelled to serve if required,
but were not guaranteed employment. Unskilled in legal
subtleties, and not yet served by an experienced class of
Trade Union secretaries, they were made the \dctims of
a thousand and one quibbles and technicalities. The
Northumberland and Durham Miners' Union grappled with
the difficulty in a thoroughly practical spirit. They engaged
W. P. Roberts,- an able and energetic sohcitor, with strong
1 Northern Star for 1843-4 ; Fynes' Miners of Northumberland and
Durham, 1873, chap. viii. ; Condition of the Working Class in England in
1S44, by Friedrich Kngcls, 1892, pp. 253-9.
2 William Prowling Roberts, the youngest son of the Rev. Thomas
Roberts, of Chelmsford, was born in 1806, and became a solicitor at
Manchester. He was an enthusiastic Chartist, and friend of Fergus
O'Connor, to whose Land Bank he acted as legal adviser. From 1843
onwards his name appears in nearly all the legal business of the Trade
Unions. The collapse of 1848 somewhat damaged his reputation, but he
continued to be frequently retained for many j'ears. In 1867 he organised
the defence of Allen. Larking, and O'Brien, the Irish " Manchester
Martyrs." who were hanged for the rescue of Fenian prisoners and the
murder of a policeman. In later years Roberts retired to a countr>'
house in the neighbourhood of " O'Connorville." near Rickmansworth, the
scene of one of O'Connor's colonies, where he died on September 7, 1871.
The ^'- Miners' Attorney-General'* 183
labour sympathies, to fight ever}^ case in the local courts.
In 1844 the Miners' Association of Great Britain and Ireland
followed this excellent example by appointing Roberts
their standing legal adviser at a salary of £1000 a year.
When the Durham miners had to relinquish his ser-
vices at the end of 1844, he was taken over by the newly
formed Lancashire Miners' Union. The " miners' attorney-
general," as he was called, showed an indefatigable activity
in the defence of his clients, and was soon retained in
all Trade Union cases. The magistrates throughout the
country found themselves for the first time confronted by a
pertinacious legal expert, who, far more ingenious than the
employers, was not less unscrupulous in taking advantage
of every technicahty of the law.
In a letter written to the Flint Glass Makers' Friendly
Society in 1851, Roberts himself gives a vivid picture of
the difficulties against which the Unions had to contend.
After explaining the law, as he understood it, he proceeds
as follows : " But it is exceedingly difficult to induce those
of the class opposed to you to take this view of things. I
do not say this sarcastically, but as a fact learnt by long
and observant experience. There are indeed men on the
bench who are honest enough, and desirous of doing their
duty. But all their tendencies and circumstances are
against you. They listen to your opponents, not only
often, but cheerfully — so they know more fully the case
against you than in your favour. To you they hsten too —
but in a sort of temper of ' Prisoner at the Bar, you are
entitled to make any statement you think fit, and the
Court is bound to hear you ; but mind, whatever you say,'
etc. In the one case you observe the hearty smile of good-
will ; in the other the derisive sneer, though sometimes
with a ghastly sort of kindliness in it. Then there is the
knowledge of your overwhelming power when acting unitedly,
A pamphlet on the Trade Union Bill of 1871 is the only publication of
his that we have discovered, but he appears also to have edited a report
of the engineers' trial in 1847, and reports of some other legal proceedings,
184 The New Spirit and the New Model
and tliis begets naturall}- a corresponding desire to resist
you at all hazards. And there are hundreds of other con-
siderations all acting the same way — meetings, political
councils, intermarriages, hopes from wills, etc. I do not
say that all occupants of the bench are thus influenced, nor
to the same extent ; but it certainly is at the best an uphill
game to contend in favour of a working man in a question
which admits of any doubt against him. It never happened
to me to meet a magistrate who considered that an agreement
among masters not to employ any particular ' troublesome
fellow ' was an unlawful act ; reverse the case, however,
and it immediately becomes a formidable conspiracy,
which must be put down by the strong arm of the law, etc.
. . . When I was acting for the Colliers' Union in the North
we resisted every individual act of oppression, even in cases
where we were sure of losing ; and the result was that in a
short time there was no oppression to resist. For it is to
be observed that oppression like that we are speaking of —
which after all is merely a more genteel and cowardly mode
of thieving — shrinks at once from a determined and decided
opposition. In the North we should have tried this case,
first in the County Court, then at the Assizes, and then
perhaps in the Queen's Bench." ^
1 Flint Glass Makers' Magazine, October 1851. The years 1847-8
had witnessed many strikingly vindictive prosecutions of Trade Unionists.
Besides the case of the engineers, to which we shall refer hereafter,
twenty-one stonemasons of London were indicted in 1848 for conspiracy,
but, after repeated postponements, the prosecuting employer failed to
proceed with' the case. The Sheffield razor-grinders stood in greater
jeopardy. John Drury, and three other members of their society, were
tried and sentenced to ten years' transportation at the instance of the
Sheffield Manufacturers' Protection Association on the random accusa-
tions of two dissolute convicts that they had incited them to destroy
machinery. This monstrous perversion of justice aroused the greatest
indignation. Public meetings were held by the National Association of
United Trades. The indictment was quashed on a technical point, but
a new one was immediately preferred against the defendants. The local
feeling was, however, so great that they were finally, after a year's suspense,
released on their own recognisances (July i^, 1849). A Sheffield Trade
Unionist declared that " the tyranny of the employers had been so great,"
in perverting the local administration of the law, " that the men laid
A Dangerous Bill 185
One result of Roberts' successful advocacy is perhaps'
to be seen in the introduction, during the Parliamentary
session of 1844, of a Bill " for enlarging the powers of
justices in determining complaints between masters, ser-
vants, and artificers," which the Government got referred
to a committee, by which various extraordinary interpola-
tions were made in what was at first a harmless measure.^
Not only was any J. P. to be authorised to issue a warrant
for the summary arrest of any workman complained of
by his employer, but " any misbehaviour concerning such
service or employment " was to be punished by two months'
imprisonment, at the discretion of a single justice. It is
easy to see what a wide interpretation would have been
given by many a justice of the peace to this vague phrase ;
and Roberts was not slow to point out the danger to his
clients. Upon his incitement- the delegate meeting of coal-
miners at Sheffield set on foot a vigorous agitation against
the Bill, which had already slipped through second reading^
and committee without a division. The Potters' Union
took the matter up with special vigour, and circulated draft
petitions throughout the Midlands. ^ A friendly member,
Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, obstructed its further progress,
and got it postponed until after the Easter recess. Mean-
while petitions poured in upon the astonished House,
amounting, it was said, to a total of two hundred, and
representing two millions of workmen. When the Bill
came on again all the Radicals and the " Young England "
Tories were marshalled against it. Sir James Graham in
vain protested that the Government meant nothing more
than a consohdation of the existing law, and led into the
lobby all his colleagues who were present, including Mr.
their grievances before the Government. Sir George Grey ordered an
inquiry. . . . Twenty cases of parties who had been convicted bj^ the
magistrates were brought before a Board of Inquiry, seventeen of which
were quashed " (Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular, November 23, 1848).
1 Bill No. 58 of 1844, introduced by Wilham Miles, M.P. (Hansard,
vols. 73 and 74.)
' Potters' Examiner. April 13, 1844.
1 86 The New Spirit and the New Model
Gladstone. But the combination on the other side of
Buncombe, Wakley, Hume, and Ferrand, with Tories
hke Lord John Manners, and a few enlightened Whigs
such as C, P. Vilhers, settled the fate of this attempt on the
part of the employers to sharpen the blunted weapon of
the law against the hated Trade Unions.^
The miners were less successful in their strikes than in
their legal and political business. In 1844 their National
Conference at Glasgow, representing 70,000 men, voted,
by 28,042 to 23,357, ii'^ favour of striking against their
grievances, and the Durham men, numbering some 30,000,
engaged in that prolonged struggle with Lord Londonderry
and their other employers for more equitable terms of hiring
and payment, to which we have already alluded. ^ After
many months' embittered strife the strike failed disastrously ;
and the great Miners' Association, whose proceedings form
so important a feature of the Northern Star for 1844 and
1845, gradually disappears from its pages, and in the general
collapse of the coal trade in 1847-8 it came completely to
an end.
But the culminating point in this revival of Trade
Union activity was the formation, at Easter, 1845, of the
National Association of United Trades for the Protection
of Labour, an organisation which resuscitated and com-
bined some of the ideas both of Owen and of Doherty. Tliis
Association was explicitly based, as its rules inform us,
" upon two great facts : first, that the industrious classes
do not receive a fair day's wage for a fair day's labour ;
and, secondly, that for some years past their endeavours
to obtain this have, with few exceptions, been unsuccessful.
The main causes of this state of things are to be found in
the isolation of the different sections of working men, and
^ Hansard, vols. 73 and 74. The Bill was lost by 54 to 97 (May i,
1844) ; see Condition of the Working Class in England in T844, by Friedrich
Engels, 189-', pp. 283-4.
* The Miners of Northumberland and Durham, by Richard Fynes,
1873, chap. IK. ; The British Coal Trade, by H. Stanley Jevons, 1915,
pp. 448-51.
A National Federation 187
the absence of a generall}^ recognised and admitted authority
from the trades themselves." But, unlike the Owenite
movement of 1833-4, the National Association of United
Trades was from the first distinguished by the moderation
of its aims and the prudence of its administration — quahties
to which we may attribute its comparatively lengthy sur-
vival for fifteen years. No attempt was made to supersede
existing organisations of particular trades by a " General
Trades Union." " The pecuhar local internal and technical
circumstances of each trade," say the rules, " render it
necessary that for all purposes of efficient internal govern-
ment its affairs should be administered by persons possessing a
practical knowledge of them. For this reason it is not intended
to interfere with the organisation of existing Trade Unions."
Moreover, the prom.oters e\ddently intended the Association
to become more of a Parliamentary Committee than a federa-
tion for trade purposes. Its purpose and duty was declared
to be " to protect the interests and promote the well-being
of the associated trades " by mediation, arbitration, and legal
proceedings, and by promoting " all measures, political
and social and educational, which are intended to improve
the condition of the labouring classes." ^
This new attempt to form a National Federation origin-
ated in a suggestion from the " United Trades " of Sheffield,
embodied in an able letter written to Duncombe ^ by their
secretary, John Drury. Duncombe had become widely
^ Rules and Regulations of the Association of United Trades for the
Protection of Industry (London, August 2, 1845). There is^ as far as we
know, only one copy of these rules in existence, but full particulars of
its estabUshment and working are to be found in the Northern Star, which
it used for a time as its official organ.
2 Thomas Slingsby Duncombe was the aristocratic demagogue of the
period. An accomplished man of the world, with the habits of a dandy,
he nevertheless devoted himself A\ith remarkable assiduity not only to
the Parhamentary business of the Chartists and Trade Unionists, but also
to the dry details of the committee work of the association of which he
became president. The Life and Correspondence of Duncombe, which his
son pubhshed in 1868, describes him almost exclusively as a fashionable
man of the world and House of Commons politician, and entirely ignores
his more solid work for Trade Unionism during the years 1845-8.
1 88 The New Spirit and the New Model
known to the Trade Unionists, not only through his friend-
ship with Fergus O'Connor, and his outspoken support of
Chartism in the House of Commons, but also by his suc-
cessful obstruction and defeat of the Masters and Servants
Bill of the previous Session. He appears to have laid
Drury's proposals before the leading men in the London
Unions, who agreed to form a committee to report on the
scheme, and to summon a conference of Trade Union
delegates from all parts of the country. At Easter, 1845,
no delegates, representing not only the London trades, but
also the Lancashire miners and textile operatives, the
hosiery and woollen-workers of Yorkshire and the Midlands,
and the " United Trades " of Manchester, Sheffield, Norwicji,
Hull, Bristol, Rochdale, and Yarmouth, met together in
London.
The preliminary report made to the Conference by the
London Committee of Trade Delegates is practically the
first manifestation of that spirit of cautious if somewhat
limited statesmanship which characterised the Trade Union
leaders of the next thirty years. ^ The Committee, whilst
recommending the immediate formation of a national
organisation, " to vindicate the rights of labour," and " to
oppose the t5n:anny of any legislative enactments to coerce
^ In this document we may perhaps trace the hand of T. J. Dunning,
one of the ablest Trade Unionists of his time. Born in 1799, he became
Secretary of the Consolidated Society of Bookbinders in 1843. In 1845
he joined the National Association of United Trades, but left that body
after a few years. The Bookbinders' Circular, which he started in 1850,
was, during the rest of his life, largely written by himself, and contains
many well-reasoned articles on Trade Union matters. In 1858 Dunning
joined the celebrated Committee of Inquiry into Trade Societies which
was appointed by the Social Science Association. He contributed a
history of his own society to the Report, and frequently took part in the
sub.sequent annual congresses. His chief literary production is the essay
entitled, Trades Unions and Strikes : their philosophy and intention (1S60,
50 pp.), which he wrote for the prize instituted by his own Union for the
best defence of the workmen's organisation. This essay, which no pub-
lisher would accept, and which was printed by .his society, remains, per-
haps—apart from (ieorge Howell's liistorical researches in Conflicts of
Capital and Labour, and Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour
Leaders the best presentation of the Trade I'nion case which any manual
worker has produced. He died in harness on the 23rd of December 1873.
A Conciliatory Policy 189
trade societies, or of a similar character to the Masters and
Servants Bill of last session, were deeply impressed with the
importance of, and beneficial tendency arising from, a good
understanding between the employer and the employed ;
seeing that their interests are mutual, and that neither can
injure the other without the WTong perpetrated recoiling
upon the party who inflicts it. They would therefore
suggest it to be one of the principal objects of this Con-
ference to cultivate a good understanding with the employer,
and thereby remove those prejudices which exist against
trade combinations, by shov/ing upon all occasions that
they only seek by combination to place themselves upon
equal terms as disposers of their labour with those who
purchase it ; to secure themselves from injury, but by no
means to infhct it upon others. Although the Committee
are anxious that this desirable and important organisation
should be carried out to the fullest possible extent, they
feel that great caution must be observed in the formation
of its laws and regulations, in order that the evils which
existed and eventually destroyed the Consolidated Union
of 1833 shall be carefully avoided. The Committee con-
ceive it necessary to call the attention of those trades who
are comparatively disunited, and whose men are conse-
quently working for different rates of wages, to the great
necessity that exists, that those who are recei\dng the highest
wages should use every effort \\ithin their power to secure
to their fellow-workmen a fair remuneration for their labour ;
and that every inducement should be held out by the several
trade societies to their separated brettiren to join them, in
order that they may be the better enabled to make common
cause in cases of aggression, which would be the certain
result if each trade were to form itself into one well-regu-
lated society for their mutual interests. , . . And, finall}^
the Committee would earnestly recommend to this Con-
ference, in order that these important points may be con-
sidered and dispassionately argued, that no proposition of
a political nature, beyond what has been already alluded
190 The New Spirit and the New Model
to, should be introduced, or occupy its attention ; con-
vinced as they are that the only way to carry out these
desirable objects satisfactorily, and with a due considera-
tion to the best interests of all those who are concerned,
is to consider and dispose of but one question at a time :
and, moreover, to keep trade matters and politics as separate
and distinct as circumstances will justify." ^
The proceedings of this Conference show that the change
of front on the part of the Trade Union leaders was reflected
in the attitude of the rank and file. The surviving influence
of Owenism is to be traced in the frequent recurrence of
the idea of co-operative production, the desire to establish
agricultural communities, and the proposal for a legislative
shortening of the hours of labour. But of the aggressive
pohcy and ambitious aims of 1830-34 scarcely a vestige
remains. Strikes were deprecated, and the idea of a general
cessation of work was entirely abandoned. The projects
of co-operative production were on an altogether different
plane from Owen's grand schemes. The Trade Unionists
of the National Conference of 1845 had apparently no vision
of a general transfer of the instruments of production from
the capitalists to the Trade Unions ; co-operative production
was regarded simply as an auxiliary to Trade Union action,
the union workshop furnishing a cheap alternative to
unproductive strike pay. Besides thus formally abandoning
the methods and pretensions of 1834, the Conference
declared its allegiance to a new method of Trade Union
activity — ^the policy of conciliation and arbitration. In
the demand for " local Boards of Trade," a phrase borrowed
apparently from the silk-weavers, we see the beginning of
that system of authoritative mutual negotiation between
the representatives of capital and labour which became a
very distinctive feature of British Trade Unionism in the
last half of the nineteenth century.
1 Report of London Committee of Trades Delegates to the National
Conference of Trades Delegates, Easter, 1845 ; preserved in the archives
of the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons.
Trade Union Caution 191
But the shadow of the failure of 1834 still hung over
projects of universal' Trade Unions. Although nearly all
trades had been represented at the first conference, most
of the larger organisations decided, on consideration, to
hold aloof from the new body. We find, for instance, the
Manchester Lodge of the Stonemasons' Society promptly
protesting against the adherence of the society's delegate,
and expressing their emphatic opinion " that past experience
has taught us that we have had general union enough."
This view was endorsed by the Central Committee, which,
in submitting the matter to the votes of the members,
observes that " there are several trade societies in England
as perfectly organised as ourselves, although their machinery
may be somewhat various ; but we can hear of none of these
societies being desirous to join this national movement. . . .
It may be very well for trades who are divided into sections
and have no national organisation amongst themselves to
join such an association — they have nothing to lose ; but
it is a question for serious reflection whether a general union
of each trade separately would not be far more effective than
the heterogeneous association in question." ^ A similar
view seems to have been taken by the Coal-miners, whose
national federation was still in existence. A delegate
meeting of the newly formed National Typographical
Association decided by a large majority to remain outside.
The Lancashire Cotton-spinners sent a delegate to the
adjourned conference, and even proposed to have perambu-
lating lecturers to explain the advantages of the new
organisation, but never actually decided to join."^
The adjourned conference on July 28, 1845, was there-
fore composed, in the main, of the delegates of the smaller
or less organised trades. About fifty delegates took part
in the proceedings, which extended over six days. It was
* Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular, May 14, 1846.
2 Minutes of delegate meetings of the " Operative Cotton-spinners,
Self-acting Minders, Twiners, and Rovers," held every other Sunday.
See July 20, August 3, and December 14, 1845.
192 The New Spirit ^and the New Model
eventually decided to separate the Trade Union from the
co-operative aims, and to form two distinct but mutually
helpful associations. The " National Association of United
Trades for the Protection of Labour " undertook to deal
with disputes between masters and men, and look after the
interests of labour in the House of Commons. The " National
United Trades Association for the Employment of Labour "
proposed to raise capital with which to employ men who
were on strike under circumstances approved by its twin
brother. At the second conference, held at Manchester in
June 1846, when 126 delegates, representing, it was said,
40,000 members, were present, the contribution to the Trade
Association was fixed at twopence in the pound of weekly
earnings ; and it was decided that the strike allowance
should vary from nine shillings up to fourteen shilhngs per
week, the latter sum being the wages agreed on for men
employed in the association's own workshops. Up to
this date no strike had been supported, as it was desired
to avoid the premature action which had, it was held,
destroyed the Grand National ConsoUdated Union. A
number of paid organisers were engaged. The Association,
which hitherto had consisted of woollen and hosierj'-workers
and of the Midland hardware trades, spread in various new
directions. The executive of the Friendly Society of Opera-
tive Carpenters and Joiners — the association that had played
so important a part in the movement of 1830 — issued a
manifesto to its members in favour of joining, and the general
secretary became an active member of the Executive of
the National Association. The Manchester Section of the
National Cordwainers' Society urged all its members and
all societies of boot and shoemakers to join. The Potters of
Staffordshire, the Miners of Scotland, the new-born National
Association of Tailors, as well as the Metropohtan branches
of the Boilermakers' and Masons' Societies came in. The
Association, in fact, became reputed a power in the land, and
drew down upon itself the abusive censure of the Times}
* Times, November i6, 1846.
The ''Document" again! 193
But in spite of the wise intentions of its founders, it soon
began to suffer from the characteristic complaints of
general unions. The depression of trade which began in
1845 brought about during the next two years reduc-
tions of wages, followed by strikes and turn-outs in
almost every branch of industry. The local committees
of the National Association, frequently composed of
the officials of the trades concerned, promised their
members the support of the national funds, and took
umbrage when the Executive sitting in London reversed
their decisions. Each constituent trade felt that its interests
were misunderstood, or its grievances neglected. A pro-
longed strike of the Manchester building trades in 1846,
begun without sanction, failed miserably, the local com-
mittee of the National Association declaring that the
collapse was due to lack of the financial support which had
been promised on behalf of the central body. The coal
and iron miners at Holytown in Lanarkshire engaged in a
struggle against their employers which excited the sympathy
of the Trade Union world, but which ended in failure. An
equally severe conflict by the cahco-printers at Crayford
in Kent met with no better success. The Scottish miners
complained that they had been inadequately supported by
the association ; and the Lancashire miners made this the
pretext for continued abstention.
Though Buncombe's association had discouraged strikes,
and acted principally as a mediating body, the employers
throughout the country showed themselves uniformly
hostile. The " document " which had figured so prominently
in 1833-4 reappeared in a sHghtly altered form. The
employers signified their toleration if not their approval
of local trade clubs, but condemned with equal acrimony
national unions of particular trades, or general unions of
all trades. Affecting a sudden concern for the independence
of character of their workmen, they insisted that the exist-
ence of any kind of central committee, however representa-
tive it might be, prevented the men from being free agents,
H
194 ^^^ ^^'^ Spirit and the New Model
and exposed them to the arbitrary commands of an irre-
sponsible body. In face of this attitude, the efforts of the
National Association to bring about peaceful settlements
met with only qualified success. The London Executive,
unable to cope with the applications for assistance that
poured in daily from all parts of the country, issued strong
admonitions against unauthorised strikes, but had eventually
to give or withhold support without sufficient knowledge
of the local circumstances. Duncombe was principally
occupied in drawing up and presenting petitions in favour
of the legislative shortening of the hours of labour, and in
this direction he rendered valuable assistance to the Lanca-
shire cotton-spinners' " Short Time Committee," which
secured the Ten Hours Act of 1847, The Central Executive
was, indeed, during these years, more a Parliamentary
Committee for the whole movement than a federation of
Trade Unions. The plan of co-operative workshops, from
which so much had been expected, proved entirely futile
in the prolonged contests of the staple trades. One
flourishing boot workshop was started ; and the 1847 con-
ference found, in all, one hundred and twenty-three men at
work, the enterprises being confined to those trades carried
on by hand labour in a small way. In 1848 it was decided
to merge the two associations in one, and to set about
raising £50,000 in order to start on a larger scale. But
before this could be attempted the association suffered a
double reverse from which it never recovered. Duncombe
was compelled, by failing health, to withdraw during 1848
from active participation in its work. And at the end of
the following year a strike of the Wolverhampton tinplate-
workers involved the National Association in a stniggle
with employers and with the law which drained its funds
and destroyed its credit.^
* The tinplate-workers of Wolverhampton had been endeavouring,
ever since they joined the Association in 1845, to obtain a uniform list
of piecework rates. By the influence of the National Association, such
a list was agreed to during 1849 by all the employers except two. One
of these trfvited the men with exceptional duphcity. Having, as he
Decline of the Federation 195
The later history of the association is obscure.^ It
hngered on for many years in a small wa}-, its paid officers
serving as advisers and representatives to a number of
minor Trade Unions. Its principal work in later years
was the promotion and support of bills for the estabUsh-
ment of councils of conciliation, and its persistent efforts
certainly paved the way for the Joint Boards subsequently
set on foot. But it ceases after 1851 to exercise anv
influence or play any important part in the Trade Union
Movement.
The National Association of United Trades stands, in
constitution and objects, half-way between the revolu-
tionary voluntarjdsm of 1830-4 and the Parhamentary
action of 1863-75. It may, in fact, be regarded either
as a belated " General Trades Union " of an improved
t3'pe, or as a premature and imperfect Parliamentary
Committee of the Trade Union world. And although
the great national Unions of the time took no part in its
thought, adequately prepared himself, he threw off the mask in July
1850, and flatly refused to continue the negotiations. The fierce in-
dustrial and legal conflict which ensued attracted general attention.
Many of the strikers were imprisoned for breach of contract ; and the
struggle culminated in the prosecution of three members of the com-
mittee of the National Association, together -with several of the local
Unionists, for conspiracy to molest and intimidate the employer by
inducing men to leave his emploj^ment. Owing to legal quibbles, raised
first on behalf of the Crown, and then on behalf of the defendants, the
case was tried no fewer than three times, the final judgment not being
dehvered until November 1851, when five of the prisoners were sentenced
to three months', and one to one month's imprisonment. See R. v. Row-
lands, 5 Cox C. C. p. 436 ; also Appendix A to The Law relating to Trade
Unions, by Sir William Erie, 1869.
1 Duncombe formally resigned the presidency in 1852. In 1856 its
secretary, Thomas Winters, gave evidence in favour of concihation before
the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives (Equitable Councils,
etc.). He stated that the membership then numbered between 5,000 and
6,000, and that the central committee consisted of three salaried members,
who gave up their whole time to the work. A subsequent secretary
(E. Humphries) appeared before a similar committee four years later, his
evidence showing that the association, though it was still in existence,
had taken no part im any of the important labour struggles of the past
seven or eight years. j\ir. George Howell incidentally puts the date of
its dissolution at i86o or 1861 (see his article " Trades Union Congresses
and Social Legislation " in Contemporary Review for September 1889).
196 The New Spirit and the New Model
proceedings, its moderate and unaggressive policy was
only one manifestation of the new spirit which now pre-
vailed in Trade Union councils. We see rising up in the
Unions of the better-paid artisans a keen desire to get at
the facts of their industrial and social condition. This
new feeling for exact knowledge may to some extent be
attributed to the increasing share which the printing trades
were now beginning to take in the Trade Union Movement.
The student of the reports of the larger compositors' societies,
from the very beginning of the century, will be struck, not
only by the moderation, but also by the elaborate Parlia-
mentary formaUty — one might almost say the stateHness
of their proceedings. Instead of rhetorical abuse of all
employers as " the unproductive classes," and total abstin-
ence from investigation of the details of disputes, we find
the compositors dealing only with concrete instances of
hardship, and referring every important question to a
" Select Committee " for inquiry and report. In 1848
the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders, estabUshed
in 1786, used part of its funds to form a library for the
benefit of its members. By 1851 a reading-room furnished
with daily and weekly newspapers had been opened. Four
years later a similar library was established by the London
Society of Compositors. In 1842, the Journe>Tnen Steam-
Engine and Machine Makers' Friendly Society started a
Mutual Improvement Class at Manchester. Even the
Stonemasons, at that time a rough and somewhat turbulent
body, were reached by the new desire for self-improvement.
The Glasgow branch of the Scottish United Operative
Masons report with pride, in 1845, that they have " formed
a class for mutual instruction ... an association for moral,
physical, and intellectual improvement " which was setting
itself to investigate the question —" Is the present improved
condition of machinery beneficial to the working classes,
or is it hurtful ? " ^ But the most effective outcome of
this desire for information was. the starting by the LTnions
^ English Stonemasuns' Fortnightly Circular, December 25, 1845.
Trade Union Journals 197
of special trade journals. The United Branches of the
Operative Potters set on foot in 1843 the Potters' Examiner,
a weekly newspaper which dealt wdth the trade interests
and technical processes of their industry. ^ The Journeymen
Steam-Engine and Machine Makers' Friendly Society issued
the Mechanics' Magazine between 1841 and 1847. ^^
November 1850 Dunning persuaded the London Consoli-
dated Society of Bookbinders to pubHsh the Bookbinders'
Trade Circular, in the pages of which he promulgated a
theory of Trade Unionism, from which McCuUoch himself
would scarcely have dissented, ^ and made that humble
organ of his society into a monthly magazine of useful
information on all matters connected with books and their
manufacture. But the best of these trade pubhcations,
and the only one which has enjoyed a continuous existence
down to the present day, was the Flint Glass Makers'
Magazine, an octavo monthly of ninety-six pages, estabUshed
at Birmingham in 1850 by the Fhnt Glass Makers' Friendly
Society,^ which advocated " the education of every man in
our trade, beginning at the oldest and coming down to the
youngest. ... If you do not wish to stand as you are and
suffer more oppression," it enjoined its readers, " we say
to you get knowledge, and in getting knowledge you get
^ The Potters' Examiner, started December 1843, was converted, in
July 1848, into the Potters' Examiner and Emigrants' Advocate, published
at Liverpool and concerned chiefly with emigration. It ceased to appear
soon after 1851.
* See especially the articles on " Wages of Labour and Trade Societies "
in the second, third, and fourth numbers (December 1850 to February
185 1 ), in which he assumes that the general level of wages is irresistibly
determined by Supply and Demand, but that Trade Unionism, in pro-
viding out-of-work pay, enables the individual workman to resist ex-
ceptional tyranny or exaction.
3 This journal contains a mass of useful information relating to the
trade, special reports of the Trades Union Congresses, and well-written
articles on industrial and economic problems. It is marked throughout
by moderation of tone and fairness of argument. Unfortunately, so far
as we know, it is not preserved in any pubUc Ubrary, and we were in-
debted to Mr. Haddleton, Secretary to the Birmingham Trades Council,
who, in 1893, possessed a complete set, for our acquaintance with its
contents.
igS The New Spirit and the New Model
power. . . . Let iis earnestly advise you to educate ; get
intelligence instead of alcohol — it is sweeter and more
lasting." ^
With increased acquaintance with industrial conditions
came a reaction against the policy of reckless aggression
which marked the Owenite inflation. Here again we
find the printing trades taking the lead. Already in 1835,
when the London Compositors were reorganising their
society, the committee went out of their way to denounce
the great general Unions. " Unfortunately almost all
Trades Unions hitherto formed," they report to their mem-
bers, " have relied for success upon extorted oaths and
physical force. . . . The fault and the destruction of all
Trades Unions has hitherto been that they have copied
the vices which they professed to condemn. While dis-
united and powerless they have stigmatised their employers
as grasping taskmasters ; but as soon as they (the workmen)
were united and powerful, then they became tyrants in
their turn, and unreasonably endeavoured to exact more
than the nature of their employment demanded, or than
their employers could afford to give. Hence their failure
was inevitable. . . . Let the Compositors of London show
the Artisans of England a brighter and better example ;
and casting away the aid to be derived from cunning and
brute strength, let us, when we contend wdth our opponents,
employ only the irresistible weapons of truth and reason." ^
The disasters of 1837-42 caused this spirit to spread to
other trades. From this time forth the minutes and circulars
of the larger Unions abound in impressive warnings against
aggressive action. " Strikes are prolific," say the delegates
of the Ironmoulders in council assembled ; "in certain
cases they beget others. . . . How often have disputes
been averted by a few timely words with employers ! It
^ opening Address to the Glass Makers of England, Ireland, and
Scotland, No. i.
^ Report of London Compositors' Committee on Amalgamation, 1834 ;
Annual Report, February 2, 1835.
opposition to Strikes 199
is surely no dishonour to explain to your employer the
nature and extent of your grievance." ^ The Stonemasons'
Central Committee repeatedly caution their members
■' against the dangerous practice of striking. , . . Keep
from it," they urge, " as you would from a ferocious animal
that you know would destroy you. . . , Remember what
it was that made us so insignificant in 1842. . . . We
implore you, brethren, as you value your own existence, to
avoid, in every way possible, those useless strikes. Let us
have another year of earnest and attentive organisation ;
and, if that does not perfect us, we must have another ;
for it is a knowledge of the disorganised state of working
men generally that stimulates the tyrant and the taskmaster
to oppress them." ^ A few years later the Liverpool lodge
invites the support of all the members for the proposition
" that our society no longer recognise strikes, either as a
means to be adopted for improving our condition, or as a
scheme to be resorted to in resisting infringements," ^ and
suggests, as an alternative, the formation of an Emigration
Fund. The Portsmouth lodge caps this proposal by insisting
not only that strikes should cease, but also that the word
" strike " be abolished ! The Flint Glass Makers' Magazine,
between 1850 and 1855, is full of similar denunciations.
" We believe," writes the editor, " that strikes have been
the bane of Trades Unions." * In 1854 the Flint Glass
Makers, on the proposition of the Central Committee,
aboUshed the allowance of " strike-money " by a vote of
the whole of the members. As an alternative it was often
suggested that a bad employer should be defeated by
quietly vdthdrawing the men one by one, as situations
could be found for them elsewhere. " As man after
man leaves, and no one [comes] to supply their place,
then it is that the proud and haughty spirit of the
^ A ddress of Delegate Meeting to the Members of the Friendly Society of
Ironmoulders of England, Ireland, and Wales, September 26, 1846,
^ Fortnightly Circular, December 25, 1845.
3 Ibid., June 1849.
•* January 1855.
200 The New Spirit and the New Model
oppressor is brought down, and he feels the power he
cannot see." ^
It was part of the same policy of restricting the use of
the weapon of the strike that the power of declaring war
on the employers was, during these years, taken away
from the local branches. In the two great societies of
which we have complete records — the Ironmoulders and
the Stonemasons — we see a gradual tightening up of the
control of the central executive. The Delegate Meeting
of the Ironmoulders in 1846 vested the entire authority
in the Executive Committee. " The system," they report,
" of allowing disputes to be" sanctioned by meetings of our
members, generally labouring under some excitement or
other, or misled by a plausible letter from the scene of the
dispute, is decidedly bad. Our members do not feel that
responsibility on these occasions which they ought. They
are hable to be misled. A clever speech, party feehng, a
misrepresentation, or a specious letter — all or any of these
may involve a shop, or a whole branch, in a dispute, unjustly
and possibly without the least chance of obtaining their
object. . . . Impressed with the truth of these opinions, we
have handed over for the future the power of sanctioning
disputes to the Executive Committee alone." ^ The Stone-
masons' Central Committee, after 1843, peremptorily forbid
lodges to strike shops, even if they do not mean to charge
the society's funds with strike-pay. And though in this
Union, unlike the Ironmoulders, the decision to strike or
not to strike was not vested in the Executive, any lodge
had to submit its demand, through the Fortnightly Circular,
to the vote of the whole body of members throughout the
kingdom — a procedure which involved delay and gave the
Central Committee an opportunity of using its influence
in favour of peace,
^ Letter on " The Evil Consequences of Strikes," in Flint Glass Makers'
Magazine, July 1850. The suggested alternative — the Strike in Detail —
is discussed in our Industrial Democracy.
* A ddress of the Delegate Meeting to the Members of the Friendly Society
of Ironmoulders, 1846.
''Supply and Demand" 201
The fact that most of the Executive Committees were,
from 1845 onward, setting their face against strikes, did
not imply the abandonment of an energetic trade poUcy.
The leaders of the better educated trades had accepted
the economic axiom that wages must inevitably depend
upon the relation of Supply and Demand in each particu-
lar class of labour. It seemed an obvious inference that the
only means in their power to maintain or improve their
condition was to diminish the supply. " All men of experi-
ence agree," affirms the Delegate Meeting of the Ironmoulders
in 1847, " that wages are to be best raised by the demand
for labour." Hence we find the denunciations of strikes
accompanied by an insistence on the limitation of apprentices,
the abolition of overtime, and the provision of an Emigra-
tion Fund. The Flint Glass Makers declare that " the
scarcity of labour was one of the fundamental principles
laid down at our first conference held in Manchester in 1849."
" It is simply a question of supply and demand, and we all
know that if we supply a greater quantity of an article
than what is actually demanded that the cheapening of
that article, whether it be labour or any other commodity,
is a natural result." ^ In this application of the doctrine
of Supply and Demand the Flint Glass Makers were joined
by the Compositors, Bookbinders, Ironmoulders, Potters,
and, as we shall presently see, the Engineers. ^ For the
next ten years an Emigration Fund becomes a constant
feature of many of the large societies, to be abandoned only
when it was discovered that the few thousands of pounds
which could be afforded for this purpose produced no visible
1 " Emigration as a Means to an End," Flint Glass Makers' Magazine,
August 1854 ; address of Executive, September 1857.
" " Thus if in a depression you have fifty men out of work they will
receive ^^1,015 in a year, and at the same time be used as a whip by the
employers to bring your wages down ; by sending them, to Australia at
;^2o per head you save /15, and send them to plenty instead of starvation
at home ; you keep your own wages good by the simple act of clearing
the surplus labour out of the market " (Farewell Address of the Secre-
tary, Flint Glass Makers' Magazine, August, 1854). " Remove the surplus
labour and oppression itself will soon be a thing of the past " {Ibid.).
H 2
202 The New Spirit and the New Model
effect in diminishing the surplus labour. Moreover, it was
the vigorous and energetic member who applied for his
passage-money, whilst the chronically unemployed, if he
could be persuaded to go at all, frequently reappeared at
the clubhouse after a brief trip at the society's expense.^
The harmless but ineffective expedient of emigration
was accompanied by the more equivocal plan of closing
the trade to new-comers. The Flint Glass Makers, like
the other sections of the glass trade, have always been
notorious for their strict limitation of the number of appren-
tices. The constant refrain of their trade organ is " Look
to the rule and keep boys back ; for this is the foundation
of the evil, the secret of our progress, the dial on which our
society works, and the hope of future generations." ^ The
printing trades were equally active. Select Committees
of the London Society of Compositors were constantly'
inquiring into the most effective way of checking boy-
labour and regulating " turnover " apprentices. And the
engineering trades, at this time entering the Trade Union
world, were basing their whole policy on the assumption
that the duly apprenticed mechanic, hke the doctor or the
solicitor, had a right to exclude " illegal men " from his
occupation.
Such was the " New Spirit " which, by 1850, was
^ Emigration Funds begin to appear in Trade Union Reports about
1843 (see the Potters' Examiner). For thirty years the accounts of the
larger societies include, oflF and on, considerable appropriations for the
emigration of members. The tabular statement of expenditure published
in the Ironmoulders' Annual Report shows, for instance, that ;^4,7i2 was
spent in this way between 1855 and 1874. lathe Amalgamated Carpenters
an Emigration Benefit lingered until 1886, when it was finally abolished
by the General Council ; the members resident in the United States and
Colonies strongly objecting to this use of the funds. But it was between
1850 and i860 that emigration found most favour as an integral part of
Trade Union policy. Tlie Trade Unions of the United States and the
Australian Colonies addressed vigorous protests to the officials of the
English societies (see, for example, the Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular,
June 1856), a fact which co-operated with the dying away of the "gold
rush," and the change of Trade Union opinion, to cause the abandon-
ment of the policy, until it was revived in 1872 for a decade or so, by
the Agricultural Labourers' Unions.
* Flint Glass Makers' Magazine, September 1857.
The "Liquor Allowance" 203
dominating the Trade Union world. Meanwhile the steady
growth of national Unions, each with three to five thousand
members, ever-increasing friendly benefits, and a weekly
contribution per member which sometimes exceeded a
shilling, involved a considerable development of Trade
Union structure. The little clubs and local societies had
been managed, in the main, by men working at their trades,
and attending to their secretarial duties in the evening.
With the growth of such national organisations as the
Stonemasons, the Ironmoulders, and the Steam-Engine
Makers, the mere volume of business necessitated the
appointment of one of the members to devote his whole
time to the correspondence and accounts. But the new
official, however industrious and well-meaning, found upon
his hands a task for which neither his education nor his
temperament had fitted him. The archives of these societies
reveal the pathetic struggles of inexperienced workmen to
cope with the difiiculties presented by the combination of
branch management and centralised finance. The dis-
bursement of friendly benefits by branch meetings, the
custody and remittance of the funds, the charges for local
expenses (including " committee liquor "),^ the mysteries
^ During these years the Executive Committees of the larger societies
were waging war on the " liquor allowance." In the reports and financial
statements of the Unions for the first half of the century, drink was one
of the largest items of expenditure, express provision being made by the
rules for the refreshment of the officers and members at all meetings.
The rules of the London Society of Woolstaplers (1813) state that " the
President shall be accommodated with his own choice of liquors, wine
only excepted." The Friendly Society of Ironmoulders (1809) ordains
that the Marshal shall distribute the beer round the meeting impartially,
members being forbidden to drink out of turn " except the of&cers at
the table or a member on his first coming to the town." Even as late
as 1837 the rules of the Steam-Engine Makers' Society direct one-third
of the weekly contribution to be spent in the refreshment of the members,
a provision which drops out in the revision of 1846. In that year the
Delegate Meeting of the ironmoulders prohibited drinking and smoking
at its own sittings, and followed up this self-denying ordinance by alter-
ing the rules of the society so as to change the allowance of beer at
branch meetings to its equivalent in money. " We beheve," they remark
in their address to the members, " the business of the society would be
much better done were there no liquor allowance. Interruption, con-
204 ^ ^^^ ^^'^ spirit and the New Model
of bookkeeping, and the intricacies of audit all demanded a
new body of officers specially selected for and exclusively
engaged in this work, i During these years we watch a
shifting of leadership in the Trade Union world from the
casual enthusiast and irresponsible agitator to a class of
permanent salaried officers expressly chosen from out of
the rank and file of Trade Unionists for their superior business
capacity. ~^But besides the daily work of administration, the
expansion' of local societies into organisations of national
extent, and the transformation of loose federations into
consolidated unions, involved the difficult process of con-
stitution-making. The records of the Ironmoulders and the
Stonemasons show with what anxious solicitude successive
Delegate Meetings were groping after a set of rules that
would work smoothly and efficiently. One Union, however,
the Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine Makers and
Millwrights' Friendly Society, tackled the problems of
internal organisation with peculiar ability, and eventually
produced, in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, a
" New Model " of the utmost importance to Trade Union
history.
To understand the rise of this remarkable society, we
must revert to the earlier history of combinations which
have hitherto scarcely claimed attention in our account of
the general movement. The origin of Trade Unionism in
the engineering trades is obscure. We learn that at the
close of the last century the then dominant class of mill-
fusion, and scenes of violence and disorder are often the characteristic of
meetings where order, calmness, and impartiality should prevail." By
i860 most of the larger societies had abolished all allowance for liquor,
and some had even prohibited its consumption during business meetings.
It is to be remembered that the Unions had, at first, no other meeting
place than the club-room freely placed at their disposal by the publican,
and that their payment for drink was of the nature of rent. Meanwhile
the Compositors and Bookbinders were removing their headquarters from
public-houses to offices of their own, and the Steam-Engine Makers were
allowing branches to hire rooms for meetings so as to avoid temptation.
In 1850 the Ironmoulders report that some publicans were refusing to
Ic-nU rooms for nieeting.s, owing to tlie growth of Temperance.
The Rise oj the Engineers 205
Wrights possessed strong, exclusive, and even tyrannical
trade societies, the chief of them being the " London
Fellowship," meeting at the Bell Inn, Old Bailey.^ The
millwrights, who were originally constructors of mill-work
of every kind, both wood and iron, were, on the introduction
of the steam-engine, gradually superseded by speciaUsed
workers in particular sections of their trade. The introduc-
tion of what was termed " the engineer's economy," that is
to say, the parcelling out of the trade of the millwright
among distinct classes of workmen, and the substitution
of " payment according to merit " for the millwrights'
Standard Rate, completely disorganised the skilled
mechanics of the engineering trade. This condition was
not materially improved by the establishment, from 1822
onward, of numerous competing Trade Friendly Societies.
The Ironmoulders alone concentrated their efforts upon
maintaining one national society. The millwrights, smiths,
pattern-makers, and other skilled mechanics engaged in
engine and machine making had societies in London,
Manchester, Newcastle, Bradford, Derby, and other engineer-
ing centres. Of these the Steam-Engine Makers (estabHshed
1824) ; the Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine Makers
and Millwrights (established 1826) ; the Associated Frater-
nity of Iron Forgers, usually called the " Old Smiths "
(estabHshed 1830) ; and the Boilermakers (estabHshed 1832)
are known to have been organisations of national extent,
with branches in aU parts of the country, competing, not
only with each other, but with the Metropolitan and other
local societies of Millwrights, Smiths, Pattern-makers,
^ It was the strength of their organisation in London in 1799, as we
have seen, that led to the employers' petition to the House of Commons,
out of which sprang the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800. See also
the evidence given by Galloway and other employers before the 1824
Select Committee on Artisans and Machinery ; also incidental references
in the Life of Sir William Fairbairn, 1877, and other works. We have
been unable to discover any documents of engineering societies prior to
1822. Sir Wilham Fairbairn, in the preface to his Mills and Mill-work,
1 86 1, attributes the supersession of the millwright to the changes con-
sequent on the introduction of the steam-engine.
2o6 The New Spirit and the New Model
and General Engineers. This anarchic rivalry prevented
any effectual trade action, and tempted employers to
give the work to the lowest bidder, and to introduce
the worst features of competitive piecework and sub-
contract.
We are, therefore, not surprised to find that the
engineers' societies took little part in the great upheaval
of 1830-4. But the wave of solidarity which then swept
over the labour world seems to have had considerable,
though tardy, effect even in this trade. The chief districts
affected were London and Lancashire. In 1836 a London
joint committee of several of the sectional societies success-
fully conducted an eight months' strike for a shortening of
the hours of labour to sixty per week, and for extra payment
for overtime. Again, in 1844 a joint committee obtained
from the London employers a further reduction of hours.
Encouraged by these successes, the members of the
Metropolitan societies and branches began to discuss the
possibility of a national amalgamation. The most prominent
personality in this movement was that of William Newton, ^
1 William Newton was born at Congleton in 1822, his father, who
had once occupied a superior position, being then a journeyman machinist.
The boy went to work in engine shops at the age of fourteen, joined the
Hanley Branch of the Journeymen Steam-Engine Makers' Society in 1842,
soon afterwards moving to London (where he worked in the same shop
as Henry James, afterwards Lord James of Hereford, then an engineer
pupil, and later noted for his knowledge of Trade Unionism), and rose to be
foreman. After his dismissal in 1848 for his Trade Union activity he took
a public-house at Ratcliffe, and devoted himself largely to the promotion
of the amalgamation of the engineering societies. In 1852 he became,
for a short period, secretary to a small insurance company. At the
General Election of 1852 he became a candidate for the Tower Hamlets.
He was opposed by both the great political parties, but the show of hands
at the hustings was in his favour. At the poll he was unsuccessful,
receiving, however, 1,095 votes. In i860 he was presented with a testi-
monial (including a sum of ;^3oo) from his A.S.E. fellow-members. In
later years he became the proprietor of a prosperous local newspaper and
was elected by the Stepney Vestry as its chairman and also as its repre-
sentative on the Metropolitan Board of Works. He became one of the
leading members of that body, on which he served from 1862 to 1876,
filhng the important office of deputy chairman to the Parhamentary, Fire
Brigade, and other influential committees. In 1868 he again contested
the Tower Hamlets against both Liberals and Conservatives, receiving
William Newton 207
a leading member of the Journeymen Steam-Engine and
Machine Makers and Millwrights' Friendly Society, the
association which afterwards became, as we shall see, the
parent of the amalgamation.
Wilham Newton had exactly the qualities needed for
his task. Gifted with remarkable eloquence, astute and
conciUatory in his methods, he was equally successful in
inspiring masses of men with a large idea, and in persuading
the representatives and officials of rival societies to agree
with the details of his scheme. His influence was augmented
by his tried devotion to the cause of Trade Unionism. In
1848 he was dismissed from a first-rate position as foreman
in a large estabhshment owing to his activity in trade matters,
and in the following years his business as a pubHcan was
seriously damaged by his constant absence on society
business. But though from the first he had been an active
member of his Union, and was for many years a Branch
Secretary, he was, so far as we know, at no time its full-
time salaried official. He stands, therefore, midway between
the casual and amateur leaders of the old Trade Unionism
and the new class of permanent officials, sticking closely to
office work, and acquiring a detailed experience in Trade
Union organisation.
Whilst Newton was bringing the London societies into
line, the Lancashire engineers were mo\dng in the same
direction. Already in 1839 a " committee of the engineering
trades " at Bolton urged upon their comrades the estabhsh-
ment of " one concentrated union " ; and in the following
year, through the energy of Alexander Hutchinson, the
secretary of the Friendly United Smiths of Great Britain
and Ireland, a United Trades Association was set on foot
in Lancashire, to comprise the " Five Trades of Mechanism,
viz. Mechanics, Smiths, Moulders, Engineers, and Mill-
wrights." The objects of this association were ably repre-
2,890 votes ; and in 1875 h6 unsuccessfully fought a bye-election at
IpSA\-ich. He died March g. 1876, when his funeral, in which the Metro-
pohtan Board of Works took part, assumed a public character.
2o8 The New Spirit and the New Model
sented and promoted by its organ, the Trades Journal,
established to extend and " improve Trades Unions generally
in Great Britain and Ireland." ^ The attempt proved,
however, premature, and it was not until the year 1844
that the Bolton men, under the leadership of John
Rowlinson, succeeded in establishing a permanent " Pro-
tection Society," composed of delegates from the Societies
of Smiths, Millwrights, Ironmoulders, Engineers, and
Boilermakers. Inspirited by the success of the Bolton
society, which successfully maintained a nine months' strike
(costing it £9,000) against the "Quittance Paper" (char-
acter note, or leaving certificate) which the employers
eventually agreed to abandon, joint committees of
engineering operatives were formed between 1844 ^^^
1850 in all the principal Lancashire centres. These were
repeatedly addressed by Rowlinson and Hutchinson, and
the ground was prepared for a systematic attempt at
national amalgamation.
The leading part in the amalgamation was taken by the
society to which Newton belonged. The Journeymen
Steam - Engine and Machine Makers and Millwrights'
Friendly Society, with its headquarters at Manchester, at
this time far exceeded any other trade society in member-
ship and wealth. Established in 1826 as the Friendly
Union of Mechanics, it had absorbed in 1837 a strong
Yorkshire society dating from 1822 (the Mechanics' Friendly
Union Institution), and by 1848 it numbered seven thousand
members organised in branches all over the kingdom, and
possessed an accumulated reserve fund of £25,000. The
silent growth of this Union, the slow perfecting of its
constitution by repeated delegate meetings held at intervals
during the preceding twenty years, stand in marked contrast
with the dramatic advent of the ephemeral organisations of
1830-34. But this task of internal organisation, with its
^ This journal is preserved in the Manchester Pubhc Library (341,
P. 37). It was a well-written i6 pp. 8vo, issued, at first fortnightly and
afterwards monthly, at 2d. No. i is dated July 4, 1840.
Rise of the Engitieers 209
l^adual working out of the elaborate financial and
administrative system which afterwards became celebrated
in the constitution of the Amalgamated Engineers, seems
to have absorbed, during the first fifteen years of its
existence, all the energy of its members. In none of the
working-class movements of this period did the society
play any part, nor do we find that it, as a whole, engaged
in any important conflicts with its members' employers.
At last, in 1843, a delegate meeting urged the members to
oppose systematic overtime, and in 1844 the society, as
we have seen, took part in the London movement for the
shortening of the hours of labour. By 1845 it seems to
have felt itself strong enough to undertake aggressive trade
action by itself, and a delegate meeting in that year
attacked the employment of labourers on machines, " the
piece master system," and systematic overtime, by
stringent resolutions upon which the Executive Committee
sitting at Manchester were directed to take early action.^
During the following year accordingly a simultaneous
attempt appears to have been made by many of the
branches to enforce these rules. This action led, at Belfast,
Rochdale, and Newton-le-Willows, to legal proceedings by
the employers, and the officers of the society, together with
over a score of its members, found themselves in the dock
indicted for conspiracy and illegal combination. ^ The trial
^ Minutes of delegate meeting at Manchester, May 12, 1845. An
admirable account of this society, founded on documents no longer
extant, is given in an article by Professor Brentano in the North British
Review, October 1870, entitled " The Growth of a Trades Union." For
some other particulars see the Jubilee Souvenir History of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers, 1901.
2 Executive Circular, 1846, cited in proceedings in R. v. Selsby. Two
full accounts of the trial were published, viz. a Verbatim Report of the
Trial for Conspiracy in R. v. Selsby and others (Liverpool, 1847, 66 pp.),
published under the ." authority of the Executive of the Steam-Engine
Makers' Society," and a Narrative, etc., of the Trial, R. v. Selsby (London,
1847, 68 pp.). Both are preserved in the Manchester Public Librar%',
P. 2198. The legal report is in Cox's Crown Cases, vol. v. p. 496, etc.
Contemporary Trade Union reports contain many references to the pro-
ceedings. It was noticed as an instance of the animus of the prosecu-
tion that the indictment contained 4914 counts, and measured fifty-
210 The New Spirit and the New Model
of the twenty-six engineers of Newton-le-Willows, and the
conviction of nine of them, including Selsby, the General
Secretary of the great mechanics' Union, caused a sensation
in the Trade Union world, and tended to draw closer together
the rival societies in the engineering trade.
The progressive trade policy of the Journeymen Steam-
Engine and Machine Makers' Society greatly increased the
ascendency which its superiority in wealth and numbers
gave it over the numerous other trade friendly societies in
the engineering trades. William Allan, a young Scotchman,
succeeded Selsby in the salaried post of general secretary
when the latter obtained a commercial post in 1848. A
close friend and ardent disciple of William Newton, he
quickly manifested, in the administration of his own society,
the capacity and energy which enabled him in future years
to play so important a part in the general history of the
Labour Movement. The cause of amalgamation was well
served by the indefatigable missionary efforts of these two
men. The anniversary dinners and friendly social meetings
of the joint committees of the societies in the Lancashire
iron trades were, as we know from contemporary records,
made the occasion of propagandist speeches, and were
doubtless used also by these astute organisers to talk over
the leading men to agreement with their proposals. The
natural jealousy felt by the great provincial centre of Trade
Unionism of the interference of the Metropolis in its concerns
was allayed by Allan's suggestion that the Lancashire
societies should call a conference of delegates at Warrington
in March 1850, for the purpose, of consultation and dis-
cussion only. At this meeting, which was attended only
by the representatives of three of the larger societies
(including the Steam-Engine Makers established at Liverpool
in 1824, and the Smiths' Benevolent, Friendly, Sick and
seven yards in length. W. P. Roberts organised the defence, which cost
the Union ;£i8oo. The firm in whose works the dispute arose became
bankrupt within ^ few years. See the Jubilee Souvenir History of the
Amalgamaled Society of Engineers, 1901.
/
William Newton 211
Burial Society, established in 1830), Newton and Allan
succeeded in getting through the outlines of their scheme
of amalgamation. During the next six months these
proposals were the subject of exhaustive discussion at every
joint committee and branch meeting. Meanwhile the
leaders had estabhshed in Manchester a weekly journal for
the express purpose of promoting amalgamation, engaging
as editor, imder a written contract. Dr. John Watts,
afterwards well known as one of the ablest advocates of
co-operation. This journal, the Trades Advocate and Herald
of Progress, stated to be " established by the Iron Trades,"
discussed the advantages of union, and incidentally taught
the doctrines of Free Trade and Co-operative Production.^
Lancashire converted and conciliated, London could
now go ahead. Under Newton's influence the London
joint committee summoned a second delegate meeting at
Birmingham in September 1850, which was attended by
representatives of seven engineering societies. At this
conference the scheme of amalgamation was definitely
adopted ; and the Metropohtan " Central Committee "
was charged, as a " Provisional Committee," to complete
the details of the transfer of the old organisation to the
new body. The tact and - skill with which Allan and
Newton carried out their project are conspicuously shown
by the way in which the act of union was regarded by all
concerned. There is no trace of suspicion on the part of
the minor societies that they were taking part in anything
but an amalgamation on equal terms. The whole Trade
Union world, including the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers itself, has retained the tradition that this great
organisation was the outcome of a genuine amalgamation
of societies of fairly equivalent standing. What happened,
^ The Trades Advocate and Herald of Progress was an 8 pp. quarto
weekly, price id., No. i being dated June 1850. The volume from
June to December 1850 is preserved in the Manchester Public Library
(401 E, 18). An able article by John Burnett in the Newcastle Weekly
Chronicle, July 3, 1875, gives a vivid picture of the struggle for amalga-
mation.
212 The New Spirit and the New Model
as a matter of fact, was that the society led by Allan and
Newton absorbed its rivals.^ The new body took over, in
its entirety, the elaborate constitution, the scheme of
benefits (with the addition of Sick Benefit and the adoption
of the innovation of an Emigration Benefit of £6), the trade
policy, and even the official staff of the Journe5^men Steam-
Engine and Machine Makers and Millwrights' Society, which
contributed more than three-fourths of the membership
with which the amalgamation started, and found itself
continued, down to the minutest details, in the rules and
regulations of the new association. An important addition
was, however, the adoption of a definite, trade policy of
restricting overtime and preventing piecework ; the institu-
tion of District Committees charged to carry out that
policy ; and the establishment of a new Strike Pay of 15s.
per week.
The conclusions of the Birmingham delegates were not
accepted without demur. Many of the branches in
Lancashire and elsewhere objected to the position obtained
by the London Committee, and stood aloof from the
amalgamation. The Manchester Committee showed signs
of jealousy at the transfer of the seat of government to the
Metropohs. But the most important defection was that of
the rank and file of the members of the Steam-Engine
Makers' Society, an association which stood in membership
and funds second only to the Journeymen Steam-Engine
Makers and Machine Makers' Society. Newton and Allan
had succeeded in persuading the whole of the Executive
to throw in their lot with the amalgamation, but the bulk
of the members revolted, and the society maintained a
separate existence down to the end of 1919, when it joined
the other societies in the creation of the Amalgamated
Engineering Union. Even in Newton's own society, in
which the main principles of the amalgamation had been
carried by large majorities, a considerable number of the
^ This was pointed out in Professor Brentano's article in the North
British Review, already quoted.
The Amalgamation 213
provincial branches remained hostile. On January 6, 185 1,
when the Provisional Committee formally assumed office
as the Executive Committee of the " Amalgamated Society
of Engineers, Machinists, Smiths, Millwrights and Pattern-
makers," scarcely 5000 members out of the 10,500 repre-
sented at the Bimiingham Conference were pa^dng to the
amalgamated funds. ^ For some months, indeed, the success
of Newton's ambitious scheme looked doubtful. Though
London had ralHed to his help, only one small society
standing aloof, the provincial branches came in very slowly.
It took three months' persuasion to raise the membership
of the amalgamation up to the level of the parent society.
Delegate meetings of the Steam-Engine Makers and the
Smiths' Societies decided against amalgamation, though
many of their branches broke away and joined the new
society. But towards the end of May the tide turned. The
remaining branches of the Journeymen Steam-Engine and
Machine Makers and Millwrights' Society held a delegate
meeting, at which it was decided no longer to oppose the
amalgamation ; the Smiths' Society of London and several
other small societies came in ; and by October Newton and
Allan were at the head of a united society of 11,000 members
paying is. per week each, the largest and most powerful
Union that had ever existed in the engineering trades, and
far exceeding in membership, and still more in annual
income, any other trade society of the time.^
1 The organ of the Executive Council was the Operative, a well-written
weekly journal, which was set on foot by Newton in January 1851. The
price was at first iJd., and afterwards id. per number. The issues from
the beginning down to July 1852, probably all that were pubUshed, are
preser\-ed in the British Museum (P. P. 1424, a.m.). Newton acted as
editor, and contributed nearly all the articles relating to the engineers
and Trade Unions generally.
2 The largest and most powerful of the other Unions in 1851 were
those of the Ironfounders and the Stonemasons, which numbered between
four and five thousand members each. It must be remembered that the
previous ephemeral associations of the cotton-spinners and miners, which
often for a time counted their tens of thousands of members, were ex-
clusively strike organisations, with contributions of id. or 2d. per week
only. The huge associations uf 1830-34 had usually no regular subscrip.
214 The New Spirit and the New Model
The successful accomplishment of the amalgamation was
followed by a conflict with the employers, which riveted the
attention of the whole Trade Union world upon the new
body. The aggressive trade policy initiated by Selsby and
Allan in Lancashire, and Newton in London had been
repeatedly confirmed by the delegate meetings of their
society, and was formally incorporated in the basis of the
larger organisation.^ The more energetic branches were not
slow in acting upon it. In 185 1 the men at Messrs. Hibbert
& Piatt's extensive works at Oldham made a series of
demands, not only for the abolition of overtime, but also
for the exclusion of " labourers and other ' illegal ' men "
from the machines. With these demands Messrs. Hibbert
& Piatt and other employers had to comply. The private
minutes of the London Executive prove conclusively that
the strike to oust labourers from machines was not authorised
by the central body ; ^ but as William Newton, now a
member of the Executive, acted as the representative of
the Oldham men in submitting these demands to Messrs.
Hibbert & Piatt, the employers, naturally inferring that
his action was the direct outcome of the amalgamation,
formed in December 185 1 the Central Association of
Employers of Operative Engineers to resist the men's
Union."
Meanwhile the London Executive had been consulting
the whole of the members on the proposal to abolish
systematic overtime and piecework, and had obtained an
almost unanimous vote in favour of immediate action. A
tion at all, and depended on irregularly paid levies. A trade society
which, like the Amalgamated Engineers, could count on a regular income
of ;^5oo a week was without precedent.
'^ See the resolutions of the Birmingham Delegate Meeting of the Iron
Trades, September 28, 1850, in the Trades Union Advocate, November
1850.
2 It was resolved : " That we are prepared to assist the workmen at
Messrs. Piatt to the utmost of our power, but cannot consent to the men
leaving their situations, because they may not at present be able to obtain
the working of the machines." The best account of the struggle is to be
found in the Jubilee Souvenir History of the A.S.E. (1901), pp. 34-41.
The Lock-Out 215
manifesto was issued to the emploj-ers, in which the
Executive announced the intention of the society to put
an end to piecework and systematic overtime after
December 31, 1851. The employers repUed by an imperious
declaration in the Times that a strike at any one establish-
ment would be met seven days later by a general lock-out
of the whole engineering trade. The men thereupon offered
to submit the question to arbitration, a proposal which the
employers ignored. On January i, 1852, the members of
the Amalgamated Society refused to work overtime, and on
the loth the masters closed, as they had threatened, every
important engineering establishment in Lancashire and the
Metropolis.
The three months' struggle that followed interested the
general pubUc more than any previous conflict. The details
were described, and the action of the employers and the
pohcy of the Union was discussed in every newspaper. The
men found unexpected friends in the little group of
" Christian Socialists," who threw themselves heartily into
the fray, and rendered excellent serv^ice, not only by hberal
subscriptions,^ but also by letters to the newspapers, pubUc
lectures, and other explanations of the men's position. The
masters remained obdurate, insisting not only upon the
unconditional withdrawal of the men's demands, but also
upon their signing the well-known " document " forswearing
Trade Union membership. The capitaUsts, in fact, took up
the old line of absolute supremacy in their establishments,
and expressly denied the men's right to take any collective
action whatsoever.
Notwithstanding the subscription of £4000 by the
public and £5000 by other trade societies, the funds at
the disposal of the Union soon began to run short. The
Executive had undertaken to support not only the 3500
of its own members and the 1500 mechanics who were out,
^ Lord Goderich, afterwards the Marquis of Ripon, gave the Executive
a cheque for /500 to enable the strike pay to be kept up on a temporary
emergency ; one of many generous efforts, during a long lifetime, to
assist the wage-earning class.
2i6 The New Spirit and the New Model
but also the 10,000 labourers who had been made idle.
Altogether over ;£43,ooo was dispensed during the six
months in out-of-work pay. Early in February the masters
opened their workshops. By the middle of March the issue
of the struggle was plain, and during April the men resumed
work on the employers' terms. Almost all the masters
insisted on the actual signature of the " document " by
their men, and most of these, under pressure of imminent
destitution, reluctantly submitted, without, however, carry-
ing out their promise by abandoning the Union. Judge
Hughes, writing in i860, describes this act of bad faith b}''
the men as " inexcusable," but there is much to be said for
the view taken by the Amalgamation Executive, who
declared that they held themselves " and every man who
unwiUingly puts his hand to that detestable document
which is forced upon us to be as much destitute of that
power of choice which should precede a contract as if a
pistol were at his head and he had to choose between death
and degradation," ^ A promise extorted under " duress "
carries with it little legal and still less moral obhgation, and
whatever discredit attaches to the transaction must be
ascribed at least as much to the masters who made the
demand as to the unfortunate victims of the labour war
who unwillingly complied with it.^
It was the dramatic events of 1852 which made the
1 Executive Circular of April 26, 1852, in Operative, May i, 1852. A
number of the men refused to sign, and many emigrated. E. Vansittart
Neale advanced ;^io3o to members for this purpose, the whole of which
was repaid by the borrowers.
* Among the abundant literature on this great struggle ma}' be men-
tioned the Account, by Thomas (afterwards Judge) Hughes, in the Report
on Trade Societies, by the Social Science Association, i860 ; J. M. Ludlow's
lectures, entitled The Master Engineers and their Workmen, 1852 ; a
pamphlet, May I not do what I will with my own ? by E. Vansittart Neale ;
Jubilee Souvenir History of the A.S.E., 1901 ; and the evidence given by
William Newton (for the men) and Sidney Smith (for the emploj-ers)
before the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives (Equitable
Councils, etc.) in 1856. The employers' manifestoes will be found in the
Times from December 1851 to April 1852 ; the men' sdocuments and
reports of their meetings in the Operative ^edited by Newton), and in the
Northern Star, then at its last gasp.
The ' ' New Model " 217
establishment of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers a
turning-point in the history of the Trade Union Movement.
The complete victory gained bj^ the employers did not, as
they had hoped, destroy the Engineers' Union. The
membership of the society was, in fact, never seriously
shaken.^ On the other hand, the pubhcity which it gained
in the conflict gave it a position of unrivalled prominence
in the Trade Union world. From 1852 to 1889 the elaborate
constitution of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
served as the model for all new national trade societies,
whilst old organisations found themselves gradually incor-
porating its leading features. The place occupied in 1830-34
by the cotton-spinners and the builders was, in fact, now
taken by the iron trades.
The " New Model " thus introduced differed, both for
good and evil, from the typical Trade Unionism of the
preceding generation. The engineering societies had to
some extent inherited the exclusive pohcy of the organisa-
tions of the skilled handicraftsmen of the beginning of the
century. Unlike the General Trades Unions of 1830-34 they
restricted their membership to legally apprenticed work-
men. Their records bear traces of the old idea of the legal
incorporation of separate trades, rather than of any general
union of " the productive classes." The generous but
impracticable " universalism " of the Owenite and Chartist
organisations was replaced by the principle of the protection
of the vested interests of the craftsman in his occupation.
The preface to the rules of the parent society expresses this
dominant idea by a forcible analogy :
^ It ended the struggle with ;^70o in hand. Its membership at the
end of 1852 had fallen from 1 1,829 to 9737, but even then it had a balance
in hand of ;^5382, and within three years the members had increased to
12,553, and the accumulated funds to the unprecedented total of ;^35,695.
And unlike all previous trade societies, its record from 1852 down to the
present time has been one of continued growth and prosperity, the member-
ship at the end of 1919 being 320,000, with accumulated funds not far
short of three million pounds, being greater in aggregate amount than the
possessions of any other Trade Union organisation of this or any other
country.
2i8 The New Spirit and ihe New Model
" The 3'outh who has the good fortune and incUnation
for preparing himself as a useful member of society by the
study of physic, and who studies that profession with
success so as to obtain his diploma from the Surgeons' Hall
or College of Surgeons, naturally expects, in some measure,
that he is entitled to privileges to which the pretending
quack can lay no claim ; and if in the practice of that
useful profession he finds himself injured by such a pretender,
he has the power of instituting a course of law against him.
Such are the benefits connected with the learned professions.
But the mechanic, though he may expend nearly an equal
fortune and sacrifice an equal proportion of his life in
becoming acquainted with the different branches of useful
mechanism, has no law to protect his privileges." ^ He is
therefore urged to join the society, which aims at securing
the same protection of his trade against interlopers as is
enjoyed by the learned professions.
This spirit of exclusiveness has had, as we shall hereafter
discern, an equivocal effect, not only on the history of the
society itself, but on that of the Trade Union Movement.
But the contemporary trade movements either did not
observe or failed to realise the tendency of this attempt to
retain or reconstruct an aristocracy of skilled workmen.
What impressed the working men was not the trade poHcy
which had brought about the defeat of 1852, but the
admirably thought-out financial and administrative system,
which enabled the Union to combine the functions of a
trade protection society with those of a permanent insurance
company, and thus attain a financial stability hitherto
undreamt of. Time proved that this constitution had its
peculiar defects. But for over twenty years no Trade
Unionist questioned its excellence, and the minute criticism
and heated abuse which it evoked from employers and their
advocates seemed only another testimony to its effectiveness.
We think it worth while, therefore, at the risk of introducing
^ Preface to Rules of the Journeymen Steam-Engine, Machine Makers,
and Millwrights' Friendly Society, edition of 1845.
Friendly Benefits 219
tedious detail, to describe the main features of this " New
Model."
In striking contrast with tlic Cotton-spinners' and
Builders' Unions of 1830-34, with their exclusively trade
purposes, the societies in the engineering trades had, like
the trade organisations of the handicraftsmen of the last
century, originated as local benefit clubs. The Journeymen
Steam-Engine Makers' Society, for instance, had from the
first provided its members with out-of-work pay, a travelling
allowance, a funeral benefit, and a lump sum in case of
accidental disablement. In 1846 it added to these benefits a
small sick allowance, and shortly afterwards an old age
pension to superannuated members. The administration of
these friendly benefits was from the outset the primary
object of the organisation. As the local benefit club
expanded into a national society by the migration of its
members from town to town, the extreme difficulty of
combining local autonomy with a just and economical
administration of extensive benefits became apparent. For
the society, it must be remembered, was not a federation
of independent bodies, each having its own exchequer and
contributing to the central fund its determinate quota of
the expenses of the central office : it was from the first a
single association with a common purse, into which all
contributions were paid, and out of which all expenditure,
down to the stationery and ink used by a branch secretary,
was defrayed. This concentration of funds carried with it
the practical advantage of forming a considerable reserve
at the disposal of the Executive. But so long as it was
combined with local autonomy, it was open to the obvious
objection that a branch might dispense benefits to its own
members with undue hberaUty, and thus absorb an unfair
amount of the moneys of the whole society. And hence we
find that in 1838 an attempt was made to centralise the
administration, by transforming the local officials from the
servants of the branches into agents of the central authority.
The inherent love of self-gov^ernment of the British artisan
220 The New Spirit and the New Model
defeated this proposal, which would inevitably have led to
local apathy and suspicion, if not to grosser evils. Some
other method of harmonising local autonomy with centralised
finance had therefore to be invented.
Under the constitution which the Amalgamated Society
took over from the Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine
Makers and Millwrights, we find this problem solved with
considerable astuteness. The branch elects and controls its
own' local officers, but acts in all cases within rules which
provide exphcitly for every detail. Each branch retains its
own funds and administers the friendly benefits payable to
its own members, including the allowance to men out of
work. The financial autonomy of the branch is, however,
more apparent than real. No penny must be expended
except in accordance vdth precise rules. The branch retains
its own funds, but these are the property of the whole
society, and at the end of each year the balances are
" equalised " by a complicated system of remittances from
branch to branch, ordered by the Central Executive in such
a way that each branch starts the year with the same amount
of capital per member. The cumbrous plan of annual
equahsation is a device adopted in order to maintain the
feeling of local self-government under a strictly centralised
financial system.^ From the decision of the branch any
member may appeal to the Central Executive Council.
The decisions of this Council on all questions of friendly
benefits are, however, strictly limited to the interpretation
of the existing laws of the society. These rules, which
1 This plan of " equalisation " is, so far as we know, peculiar to Trade
Unions, though we understand from Dr. Baernreither's Evglish Associa-
tions of Working Men, pp. 283-84, that a few branches of some of the
Friendly Societies adopted a somewhat similar system. Its origin is
unknown to us, but the device is traditionally ascribed to the Journey-
men Steam-Engine and Machine Makers and Millwrights' Society, estab-
lished in 1826. It was also in early use by the Steam-Engine Makers'
Society, established in 1824. Until the Trade Union Act of 1871 it had
a positive use. Depending, as Trade Unions were obliged to do, upon
the integrity of their officers, there were great advantages in the wide
distribution of the funds and the local responsibihty of each branch for
the safe keeping of its share.
Trade Policy 221
include in equal detail both the constitutional and the
financial code, cannot be altered or modified except by a
specially convened meeting of delegates from every district.
Careful provision is, moreover, made against the danger of
hasty or ill-considered legislation even by this supreme
authority. No amendment may be so much as considered
without having been circulated to all the branches six weeks
prior to the delegate meeting, and having thereupon been
discussed and re-discussed by the members at two successive
general meetings convened for the purpose. Thus every
delegate comes to his legislative duties charged with a
direct and even detailed mandate from his constituents.
Moreover, it is expressly provided that no friendly benefit
shall be abrogated unless the decision of the delegate
meeting to that effect is ratified by a majority of two-thirds
on a vote of the members of the whole society. As a
friendly society, therefore, the Association consists of a
number of self-governing branches acting according to the
provisions of a detailed code, and amenable, in respect of
its interpretation, to a Central Executive.
As a Trade Union, on the contrary, the Association has
been from the first a highly centrahsed body. The great
object of the amalgamation was to secure uniformity in
trade pohcy, and to promote the equahsation of what the
economists call " real wages " ^ throughout the whole
country. With this view the Central Executive has always
retained the absolute power of granting or withholding
strike pay. No individual can receive strike allowance from
his branch except upon an express order of the Executive,
Local knowledge, however, is clearly needed for the decision
in matters of trade pohcy, and on the amalgamation
" district " committees were established, consisting of the
representatives of neighbouring branches. These com-
mittees have no concern with the administration of
friendly benefits, which, as we have seen, is the business of
^ That is to say, local differences in the cost of living have always
been taken into account.
222 The New Spirit and the New Model
eacli branch. Their function is to guard the local interests
of the trade, to watch for encroachments, and to advise the
Executive Council in the administration of strike pay.
Unlike the branches, they possess no independent authority,
and are required to act strictly under the orders of head-
quarters, to which the minutes of their proceedings are
regularly sent for confirmation.
Not less impressive than this elaborate constitution, with
its system of checks and counter-checks, was the magnitude
of the financial transactions of the new society. The high
contribution of a shiUing a week, paid with unexampled
regularity by a constantly increasing body of members,
provided an income which surpassed the wildest dreams
of previous Trade Union organisations, and enabled the
society to meet any local emergency without serious effort.
A large portion of this income was absorbed by the
expensive friendly benefits, which were on a scale at that
time unfamiliar to the societies in other trades. And when
it was found that the contribution of a shilling a week not
only met all these requirements, but also provided an
accumulating balance, which could be drawn upon for
strike pay, the indignation of the employers knew no
bounds. For many years the union of friendly benefits
with trade protection funds, now considered as the guarantee
of a peaceful Trade Union policy, was denounced as a
dishonest attempt to subsidise strikes at the expense of the
innocent subscriber to a friendly society insurance against
sickness, accident, and old age.^
In scarcely less marked contrast with the current
tradition of Trade Unionism was the publicity which the
Amalgamated Engineers from the first courted. Powerful
societies, such as the existing Union of Stonemasons, had
1 Such protests were frequent in the evidence before the Royal Com-
mission of 1S67- 68, and form the staple of the innumerable criticisms on
Trade Unionism between 1852 and 1879. A good vindication of the Trade
Union position is contained in Professor Beesly's article in the Fortnightly
Revieiv, 18G7, which was republished as a pamphlet. The Amal^nnialed
Society of Carpenters and Joiners, 1867, 20 pp.
The Need for Publicity 223
between 1834 and 1850 elaborated a constitution which
proved as durable as that of the Amalgamated Engineers,
though of a sHghtly different type. But the old feeUng of
secretiveness still dominated both the leaders and the rank
and file. The Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular, which,
regularly appearing as it has done since 1834, constitutes
perhaps the most valuable single record of the Trade Union
Movement, was never seen outside the branch meeting-
place.^ At the Royal Commission of 1867-8 the employers'
witnesses bitterly complained of their inabiUty to get copies
of this publication and of a similar periodical circular of
the Bricklayers' Society. ^ As late as 1871 we find the Uability
to publicity adduced by some Unions as an argument
against seeking recognition by the law.
The leaders of the Engineers believed, on the contrary,
in the power of advertisement. We have already noticed
the two short-Hved newspapers which Newton and Allan
published in 1850 and 1851-2, for the express purpose of
making known the society and its objects. For many years
after the amalgamation it was a regular practice to forward
to the press, for pubUcation or review, all the monthly,
quarterly, and annual reports, as well as the more important
of the circulars issued to the members. Representatives
were sent to the Conference on Capital and Labour held
by the Society of Arts in 1854, ^^^ "to the congresses of
the Social Science Association from 1859 onward. Newton
and Allan appear, indeed, to have eagerly seized every
opportunity of writing letters to the newspapers, reading
papers, and deUvering lectures about the organisation which
they had estabhshed.
It is easy to understand the great influence which, during
^ The unique collection of these circulars, containing not only statistical
and other information of the society, but also frequent references to the
building trades and the general movement, was generously placed at our
disposal for the purpose of this work, and we have found it of the utmost
value.
2 See, for instance, the evidence of Mault, Questions 3980 in Second
Report and 4086 in Third Report.
224 ^^^ ^^"^ Spirit and the New Model
the next twenty years, this " New Model " exercised upon
the Trade Union world. Its most important imitator was
the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, which, as we shall
see, arose out of the great London strike of 1859-60, The
tailors in 1866 drew together into an amalgamated society,
which adopted, almost without alteration, the whole code
of the engineers, and in 1869 the London Society of
Compositors appointed a special committee to report upon
" the constitution and working of the Amalgamated Trades,"
with a view to their imitation in the printing industry —
an intention which, in spite of the favourable character of
the report, was not carried out.^ Scarcely a trade exists
which did not, between 1852 and 1875, either attempt
to imitate the whole constitution of the Amalgamated
Engineers, or incorporate one or other of its characteristic
features.
The five or six years following the collapse of the great
lock-out of 1852, though constituting a period of quiet
progress in particular societies, are, for the historian of the
general Trade Union Movement, almost a blank. The
severe commercial depression of 1846-49 was succeeded by
seven years of steadily expanding trade, which furnished
no occasion for general reduction of wages. The reaction
against the ambitious projects of the Trade Union of 1834
continued to discourage even federal action ; "^ whilst the
complete failure of the struggle of the engineers, followed
as it was in 1853 by the disastrous strilce of the Preston
cotton-spinners for a ten per cent advance, by an equally
unsuccessful struggle of the Kidderminster carpet-weavers,
and by a fierce and futile conflict by the Dowlais iron-
workers,^ increased the disinchnation of the Unions to
aggressive trade action on a large scale. The disrepute
^ Report of Special Committee, 1869.
- The National Association of United Trades continued, as we have
already seen, in nominal existence until i860 or 1861, but after 1852 it
sank to a membership of a few thousands, and played practically no part
in the Trade Union world.
" limes, June to December 1S53.
The Self-Governing Workshop 225
into which strikes had fallen was intensified by the spread
among the more thoughtful working men of the principles
of Industrial Co-operation. This new development of
Owen's teaching took two forms, both, it need hardly be
said, differing fundamentally from the Owenism of 1834.
In Lancashire the success of the " Rochdale Pioneers,"
estabhshed in 1844, had led to the rapid extension of the
Co-operative Store, the association of consumers for the
supply of their own wants. To some extent the stalwart
leaders of the Lancashire and Yorkshire working men were
diverted from the organisation of trade combinations to
the estabhshment of co-operative shops and corn-mills.
Meanwhile the " Christian SociaUsts " of London had
caught up the idea of Buchez and the Parisian projects
of 1848, and were advocating with an almost apostolic
fervour the formation of associations of producers, in which
groups of working men were to become their own employers.^
The generous enthusiasm with which the " Christian
Socialists " had thrown themselves into the Engineers'
struggle, and their obvious devotion to the interests of
Labour, gave their schemes of " Self-governing Workshops "
a great vogue. Numberless smaU undertakings were started
by operative engineers, cabinetmakers, tailors, bootmakers,
and hatters in the MetropoHs and in other large industrial
centres, and for a few years the Executives and Committees
of the various Unions vied \vith each other in recommending
co-operative production to their members. But it soon
became apparent that this new form of co-operation was
intended, not as an adjunct or a development of the Trade
Union, but as an alternative form of industrial organisation.
For, unlike the Owenites of 1834, the Christian Socialists
had no conception of the substitution of profit-making
^ A more detailed account of these developments wiU be found in The
Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (1891 ; second edition, 1893),
by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb) ; Co-operative Production, by
Benjamin Jones, 1894; and in the Report of the Fabian Research
Department on Co-operative Production, published as a supplement to
The New Statesman, February 14. 1914.
I
226 The New Spirit and the New Model
enterprise by tlie whole body of wage-earners, organised
either in a self-contained community or in a complete
Trades Union. They sought only to replace the individual
capitalist by self-governing bodies of profit-making workmen.
A certain number of the ardent spirits among the London
and north country workmen became the managers and
secretaries of these undertakings, and ceased to be energetic
members of their respective Unions. " We have found,"
say the Engineers' Executive in their annual report of 1855,
" that when a few of our own members have commenced
business hitherto they have abandoned the society, and
conducted the workshops even worse than other employers."
Fortunately for the Trade Union Movement the uniform
commercial failure of these experiments, so long, at an}'
rate, as they retained their original form of the self-governing
workshop, soon became obvious to those concerned. The
idea of " Co-operative Production " constantly reappears in
contemporary Trade Union records, but after the failure of
the co-operative establishments of 1848-52 it ceases, for
nearly twenty years, to be a question of " practical poUtics "
in the Trade Union world.
In spite of this intellectual diversion the work of Trade
Union consolidation was being steadily carried on. The
Amalgamated Engineers doubled their numbers in the ten
years that followed their strike, and by 1861 their Union
had accumulated the unprecedented balance of 1^73,398.
The National Societies of Ironfounders and Stonemasons
grew in a similar proportion. A revival of Trade Unionism
took place among the textile operatives. The present
association of Lancashire cotton-spinners began its career
in 1853, whilst the cotton- weavers secured in the same year
what has been fitly termed their Magna Charta, the
" Blackburn List " of piecework rates. But with the
exception of the building trades, Trade Unionism assumed,
during these years, a peaceful attitude. The leaders no
longer declaimed against " the idle classes," but sought to
justify the Trade Union position with arguments based on
The Building Trades 227
middle-class economics. The contributions of the Amal-
gamated Engineers are described " as a general voluntary
rate in aid of the Poor's Rate." ^ The Executive Council
cannot doubt that employers will not " regard a society
like ours with disfavour. They will begin to understand
that it is not intended, nor adapted, to damage their
interests, but rather to advance them, by elevating the
character of their workmen, and proportionately lessening
their own responsibilities." The project of substituting
" Councils of Concihation " for strikes and lock-outs grew
in favour with Trade Union leaders. Hundreds of petitions
in favour of their establishment were got up by the
National Association of United Trades, thei^ on its last
legs. The House of Commons Committees in 1856 and i860
found the operatives in all trades disposed to support the
principle of voluntary submission to arbitration. For a
brief period it seemed as if peace was henceforth to prevail
over the industrial world.
The era of strikes which set in with the contraction
of trade in 1857 proved how fallacious had been these
hopes. The building trades, in particular, had remained
less affected than the Engineers or the Cotton Operatives
by the change of tone. The local branches of the Stone-
masons, Bricklayers, and other building trade operatives,
often against the wish of their Central Committees_jKere
engaged between 1853 and 1859 ^ ^^ almost constant suc-
cession of httle strikes against separate firms, in which the
men were generally successful in gaining advances of wages. ^
^ Address of the Executive Council of the Amalgamated Society of En-
gineers to their Fellow-Workmen, 1855.
2 See The Strikes, their Extent, Evils, and Remedy, being a Description
of the General Movement of the Mass of the Building Operatives throughout
the United Kingdom, by Vindex (1S53), 56 pp. One consequence of this
renewed outburst of strikes was the appointment in 1858 by the newly
formed National Association for the Promotion of Social Science of a
Committee to inquire into trade societies and disputes. This inquiry,
conducted by able and zealous investigators, resulted in i860 in the
publication of a volume which contains the best collection of Trade
Union material and the most impartial account of Trade Union action
that has ever been issued. As a source of history and economic illustra-
228 The New Spirit and the New Model
These years were, moreover^ notable for the recognition in
the provincial building trades of " working rules," or signed
agreements between employers and workmen (usually
between the local Masters' Associations and the Trade
Unions), specifying in minute detail the conditions of the
collective bargain. Without doubt the adoption of these
rules was a step forward in the direction of industrial peace ;
but, like international treaties, they were frequently pre-
ceded by desperate conflicts in which both sides exhausted
their resources, and learnt to respect the strength of the
other party. With the depression of trade more important
disputes occurred. During 1858 fierce conflicts arose
between masters and men in the flint glass industry and
in the West Yorkshire coalfield. The introduction of the
sewing-machine into the boot and shoemaking villages of
Northamptonshire led to a series of angry struggles. But
of the great disputes of 1858 to 1861, the builders' strike
in the Metropolis in 1859-60 was by far the most important
in its effect upon the Trade Union Movement.
The dispute of 1859 originated in the growing move-
ment for a shortening of the hours of labour,^ The demand
for a Nine Hours Day in the Building Trades was first
made by the Liverpool Stonemasons in 1846, and renewed
by the London Stonemasons in 1853. In neither case,
however, was the claim persisted in. Four years later
the movement was revived by the London Carpenters,
whose memorial to their employers was met, after a joint
tion this Report on Trade Societies and Strikes (i860, 651 pp.) is far superior
to the Parhamentary Blue Books of 1824, 1825, 1838, and 1867-68.
Among the contributors were Godfrey Lushington (afterwards Under-
Secretary of State for the Home Department), J. M. Ludlow (afterwards
Registrar of Friendly Societies), Thomas (afterwards Judge) Hughes,
Q.C., Mr. G. Shaw-Lefevre (afterwards Lord Eversley), F. D. Longe, and
Frank Hill. The Committee was presided over b)' the late Sir James
Kay-Shuttleworth, and amongst its other members may be mentioned
W. E. Forstcr, Henry Fawcett, R. H. Hutton, Rev. F. D. Maurice, Dr.
William Farr, and one Trade Union secretary, T. J. Dunning, of the
London Bookbinders.
^ See the account of it in Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, und
Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902.
The Nine Hours Day 229
conference, by a decisive refusal. Meanwhile the Stone-
masons, were seeking to obtain the Saturday half -holiday,
which the employers equally refused. This led, in the
autumn of 1858, to the formation of a Joint Committee of
Carpenters, Masons, and Bricklayers, which, on November
18, 1858, addressed a dignified memorial to the master
builders, urging that the hours of labour should be shortened
by one per day, and that future building contracts should
be accepted on this basis. At first ignored by the employers,
this request was eventually refused as decidedly as it had
been in 1853 and 1857. The Joint Committee thereupon
made a renewed attempt by petitioning four firms selected
by ballot. Among these was that of Messrs. Trollope,
who promptly dismissed one of the men who had presented
the memorial. This action led to an immediate strike
against Messrs. Trollope. Within a fortnight every master
builder in London employing over fifty men had closed
his establishment, and twenty-four thousand men were
peremptorily deprived of their employment. The contro-
versy which raged in the columns of contemporary news-
papers during this pitched battle between Capital and
Labour brought out in strong rehef the state of mind of
the Metropolitan employers. Uninfluenced by the progress
of public opinion, or by the new tone of respect and modera-
tion adopted by Trade Union leaders, the London employers
took up the position of their predecessors of 1834. They
absolutely refused to recognise the claim of the representar
fives of the men even to discuss with them the conditions
of employment. This attitude was combined \vith a deter-
mined attempt to destroy all combination, the instru-
ment adopted being the well-worn Document. The Central
Association of Master Builders resolved, in terms almost
identical with its predecessor of 1834, that " no member
of this Association shall engage or continue in his employ-
ment any contributor to the funds of any Trades Union
or Trades Society which practises interference with the
regulation of any establishment, the hours or terms of
230 The New Spirit and the New Model
labour, the contracts or agreements of employers or employed,
or the qualification or terms of service."
This declaration of war on Trade Unionism gained for
the men on strike the support of the whole Trade Union
world. The Central Committee of the great society of
Stonemasons, which had hitherto discouraged the Metro-
politan Nine Hours Movement as premature, took up the
struggle against the Document as one of vital importance.
Meetings of delegates from the organised Metropolitan
trades were held in order to rally the forces of Trade Unionism
to the cause of the builders. The subscriptions which poured
in from all parts of the kingdom demonstrated the possession,
in the hands of trade societies, of heavy and hitherto un-
suspected reserves of financial strength. The London
Pianoforte Makers contributed £300. The Flint Glass
Makers, who had just emerged from a prolonged struggle
on their own account, sent a similar sum. " Trades Com-
mittees " were formed in all the industrial centres, and
remitted large amounts. Glasgow and Manchester sent
over £800 each, and Liverpool over £500. The newly
formed Yorkshire Miners' Association forwarded £230.
The Boilermakers, Coopers, and Coachmakers' Societies
were especially liberal in their gifts. But the sensation
of the subscription list was the grant by the Amalgamated
Engineers of three successive weeldy donations of £1000
each — an event long recalled vidth emotion by the survivors
of the struggle. Altogether some £23,000 were subscribed
(exclusive of the payments by the societies directly con-
cerned), an amount far in excess of any previous strike
subsidy.
Such abundant support enabled the men to defeat the
employers' aims, though not to secure their own demands.
The Central Association of Master Builders clung despe-
rately to the Document, but failed to obtain an adequate
number of men willing to subscribe to its terms. In
December 1859 ^ suggestion was made by Lord St.
Leonards that the Document be withdrawn, a lengthy
The Amalgamated Carpenters 231
statement of the law relating to trade combinations being
hung up in all the estabUshments as a substitute. The
employers' obstinacy held out for two months longer,
but finally succumbed in February i860, when the
Platonic suggestion of Lord St. Leonards was adopted,
and the embittered dispute was brought to an end.
This drawn battle between the forces of Capital and
Labour ranks as a leading event in Trade Union history,
not only because it revived the feeling of solidarity between
different trades, but also on account of the importance
of two consolidating organisations to which it gave birth.
Out of the Building Trades Strike of 1859-60 arose the
London Trades Council (to be described in the following
chapter) and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters,
the most notable adoption by another trade of the " New
Model " introduced by Newton and Allan.
The strike had revealed to the London carpenters the
complete state of disorganisation into which their industry
had fallen. It was they, it is true, who had initiated the
Nine Hours Movement in the Metropolis, but the com-
mittee which memorialised the employers had represented
no body of organised workmen. George Potter, who was
the leader of this movement, could draw around him only a
group of delegates elected by the men in each shop. There
were, indeed, not more than about a thousand carpenters
in London who were members of any trade society whatso-
ever, and these were scattered among numerous tiny benefit
clubs. The Friendly Society of Operative Carpenters,
which, as we have seen, was a militant branch of the Builders'
Union of 1830-34, had, like the Stonemasons' Society,
maintained a continuous existence. Unlike that society,
however, it had kept the old character of a loose federation
for trade purposes only, depending for its finances upon
occasional levies. Perhaps for this reason it had lost its
exclusive hold upon the provinces, and had gained no footing
in London, As a competent observer remarks : "At the
time of the 1859-60 strikes the masons alone of the build-
232 The New Spirit and the New Model
ing trades were organised into a single society extending
throughout England, and providing not only for trade
purposes, but for the ordinary benefits. . . . The London
masons locked out were supported regularly and punctually
by their society, and could have continued the struggle
for an indefinite time ; but the other trades, split up into
numerous local societies, were soon reduced to extremities." ^
The Carpenters' Committee sav^ with envy the capacity
of the Stonemasons' Society to provide long-continued
strike pay for its members, and were profoundly impressed
by the successive donations of £1000 each made by the
Amalgamated Engineers. Directly the strike was over,
the leading members of the little benefit clubs met together
to discuss the formation of a national organisation on the
Engineers' model. Wilham Allan lent them every assistance
in adapting the rules of his own society to the carpenters'
trade, and watched over the preliminary proceedings. The
new society started on June 4, i860, with a few hundred
members. For the first two years its progress was slow ;
but in October 1862 it had the good fortune to elect as
its general secretary a man whose ability and cautious
sagacity promptly raised it to a position of influence in
the Trade Union world. Robert Applegarth, secretary
of a local Carpenters' Union at Sheffield, had been quick
to perceive the advantages of amalgamation, and had
brought his society over with him. Under his admini-
stration the new Union advanced by leaps and bounds,
and in a few years it stood, in magnitude of financial trans-
actions and accumulated funds, second only to the Amalga-
mated Society of Engineers itself. Moreover, Applegarth's
capacity brought him at once into that little circle of Trade
Union leaders whose activity forms during the next ten
years the central point of Trade Union history.
^ Prof. E. S. Beesly, Fortnightly Review, 1867.
CHAPTER V
THE JUNTA AND THEIR ALLIES
Many influences had during the preceding years been
co-operating to form what may abnost be described as a
cabinet of the Trade Union Movement. The estabhsh-
ment of such great trade friendly societies as the Amalga-
mated Engineers had created, in some sense, a new school
of Trade Union officials, face to face with intricate problems
of administration and finance. The presence in London
of the headquarters of these societies brought their salaried
officers into close personal intimacy with each other. And
it so happened that during these years the little circle of
secretaries included men of marked character and abiUty,
who were, both by experience and by temperament, ad-
mirably fitted to guide the movement through the acute
crisis which we shall presently describe.
Foremost in this Uttle group — which we shall hereafter
call the Junta — were the general secretaries of the two amal-
gamated societies of Engineers and Carpenters, William
Allan and Robert Applegarth, whose success in building up
these powerful organisations had given them great influence
in Trade Union councils. Bound to these in close personal
friendship were Daniel Guile, the general secretary of the
old and important national society of Ironfounders, Edwin
Coulson, general secretary of the " London Order " of Brick-
layers, and George Odger, a prominent member of a small
union of highly skilled makers of ladies' shoes, and an
influential leader of London working-class Radicalism.
233 I 2
234 ^^^ Junta and their Allies
William Allan was the originator of the " New Unionism "
of his time.^ We have already described how, with the aid
of William Newton, he had gathered up the scattered frag-
ments of organisation in the engineering trade, and had
adapted the elaborate constitution and financial system of
an old-established society to the needs of a great national
amalgamation. In long hours of patient labour in the office
he had built up an extremely methodical, if somewhat
cumbrous, system of financial checks and trade reports, by
which the exact position of each of his tens of thousands
of members was at all times recorded in his official pigeon-
holes. The permanence of his system is the best testimony
to its worth. Even to-day the Engineers' head office retains
throughout the impress of Allan's tireless and methodical
industry. Excessive caution, red-tape precision, an almost
miserly solicitude for the increase of the society's funds,
were among Allan's defects. But at a time when working
men " agitators " were universally credited with looseness
in money matters and incapacity for strenuous and regular
mental effort, these defects, however equivocal may have
been their ultimate effect on the policy and development
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, produced a
favourable impression on the public. Allan, moreover,
though not a brilliant speaker, or a man of wide general
interests, was a keen working-class politician, whose temper
and judgement could always be depended on. And he has
^ William Allan was born of Scotch parents at Carrickfergiis, Ulster,
in 1813. His father, who was manager of a cotton-spinning mill, re-
moved to a mill near Glasgow, and William became in 1825 a piecer in
a cotton factory at Gateside. Three years later he left the mill to be
bound apprentice to Messrs. Holdsworth, a large engineering firm at
Anderston, Glasgow. At the age of nineteen, before his apprenticeship
was completed, he married the niece of one of the partners. In 1835 he
went to work as a journeyman engineer at Liverpool, moving thence,
with the railway works, to their new centre at Crewe, where he joined
his Union. On the imprisonment of Selsby, in 1847, he became its general
secretary, retaining this office when, in 1851, the societj' became merged
in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. For over twenty years he
was annually re-elected secretary of this vast organisation, dying at last
in office in 1874.
Robert Applegarth 235
left behind him the tradition, not only of absolute integrity
and abnormal industry, but also of a singular freedom from
personal vanity or ambition.
Whilst Allan aimed at transforming the " paid agitator "
into the trusted officer of a great financial corporation,
Robert Applegarth sought to win for the Trade Union
organisation a recognised social and poHtical status.
Astute and lawyer-like in temperament, he instinctively
made use of those arguments which were best fitted to
overcome the prejudices and disarm the criticisms of
middle-class opponents. Nor did he limit himself to justi-
fying the ways of Trade Unionists to the world at large.
He made persistent attempts to enlarge the mental horizon
of the rank and file of his own movement, opening out to
those whose vision had hitherto been limited to the strike
and the tap-room, whole vistas of social and political
problems in which they as working men were primarily con-
cerned. Hence we find him, during his career as general
secretary, a leading member of the famous " International," ^
^ The celebrated " International Association of Working Men," which
loomed so large in the eyes of Governments and the governing classes
about 1869-70, had arisen out of the visit of two French delegates to
London in 1863, to concert joint action on behalf of Poland. It was
formally established at a meeting in London on September 28, 1864, at
which an address prepared by Karl Marx was read. Its fundamental
aim was the union of working men of all countries for the emancipation
of labour ; and its principles went on to declare that " the subjection of
the man of labour to the man of capital lies at the bottom of all servitude,
all social misery, ^nd all political dependence." Between 1864 and 1870,
branches were established in nearly all European countries, as well as in
the United States, the majority of trade societies in some European
countries joining in a body. The central administration was entrusted
to a General Council of fifty-five members sitting in London, which was
composed of London residents of various nationaUties, elected by the
branches in the countries to which they belonged. The General Council
had, however, no legislative or other control over the branches, and in
practice served as little more than a means of communication between
them, each country managing its own affairs in its own way. The prin-
ciples and programme of the Association underwent a steady development
in the succession of annual international congresses attended by delegates
from the various branches. The extent to which EngUsh working men
really participated in its fundamental objects is not clear. In 1870
Odger was president and Applegarth chairman of the General Council,
which included Benjamin Lucraft, afterwards a member of the London
236 The Junta and their Allies
and an energetic promoter of the Labour Representation
League, the National Education. League, and various philan-
thropic and political associations. Political reformers
became eager to secure his adhesion to their projects : he
was, for instance, specially invited to attend the important
conferences of the National Education League at Birming-
ham as the special representative of the working classes ;
and it was owing to his reputation as a social reformer that
he was in 1870 selected to sit on the Royal Commission
upon the Contagious Diseases Acts, thus becoming the first
working man to be styled by his Sovereign " Our Trusty
and Well-beloved." Open-minded, alert, and conciliatory,
he formed an ideal representative of the English Labour
Movement in the political world. ^
School Board, and other well-known working-men politicians. But few
English Trade Unions (among them being the Bootmakers and Curriers)
joined in their corporate capacity ; and when, in October 1866, the
General Council invited the London Trades Council to join, or, that
failing, to give permission for a representative of the International to
attend its meetings, with a view of promptly reporting all Continental
strikes, the Council's minutes show that both requests were refused. The
London Trades Council declined indeed to recognise the International
even as the authorised medium of communication with trade societies
abroad, and decided to communicate with these directly. Applegarth
attended several of the Continental congresses as a delegate from England,
and elaborately explained the aims and principles of the Association in
an interview published in the New York World of May 21 1870. After
the suppression of the Commune the branches in France were crushed
out of existence ; and the membership in England and other countries
fell away. The annual Congress held in 1872 at The J^ague decided to
transfer the General Council to New York, and the "International"
ceased to play any part in the English Labour Movement. An interest-
ing account of its Trade Unionist action appeared in the Fortnightly
Review for November 1870, by Professor E. S. Beesly.
* Robert Applegarth, the son of a quartermaster in the Royal Navy,
was born at Hull on January 23, 1833. At the age of eleven he went
to work as errand boy, eventually drifting into the shop of a joiner and
cabinetmaker, where, unapprenticed, he picked up the trade as best he
could. In 1852 he moved to Sheffield; but in 1855, on the death of
his parents, he emigrated to the United States, returning to Sheffield in
the following year, as the health of his wife did not allow her to follow
him to the land of promise. Joining the local Carpenters' Union, he
quickly became its most prominent member, and brought it over in a
body when the formation in 1861 of the Amalgamated Society of Car-
penters and Joiners offered a prospect of more efficient trade action.
George Odger 237
The permanent officials of the Ironfounders and the
London Bricklayers were men of less originahty than Allan
or Applegarth. Guile was a man of attractive personality
and winning manner, gifted with a certain rugged eloquence.
Coulson is described by an opponent as being " stolid and
obstinate," and again as " bricky and stodgy " ; but the
expansion, under his influence, of the Uttle London Society
of Bricklayers into a powerful Union of national scope,
proves him to have possessed administrative ability of no
mean order. The special distinction of all four alike was
their business capacity, shown by the persistency and
success with which they pursued, each in his own trade,
the pohcy originated by Newton and Allan, of basing Trade
Union organisation upon an insurance company of national
extent. George Odger brought to the Junta quite other
quahties than the cautious industr}^ of Allan or the lawyer-
like capacity of Applegarth. Of the five men we have men-
tioned he was the only one who continued to work at his
trade, and who retained to the last the full flavour of a
working-class leader. An orator of remarkable power, he
swayed popular meetings at his will, and was the idol of
Metropolitan Radicalism. But he was no mere demagogue.
Beneath his brilliant rhetoric and emotional fervour there
Elected general secretary in 1862, he retained the office until 1871, when,
in consequence of various personal disputes in the society, he voluntarily
resigned. In 1870, on the formation of the London School Board, he
stood as a candidate for the Lambeth division, but was unsuccessful,
though he received 7600 votes. In the same year he was invited to
become a candidate for Parhament for the borough of Maidstone, but he
retiredinfavourof Sir John Lubbock. In 1 871 he was appointed a member
of the Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Act. On resigning
his secretaryship he turned for a time to journalism, and acted as war
correspondent in France for an American newspaper. Shortly afterwards
he became foreman to a firm of manufacturers of engineering and diving
apparatus, eventually becoming the proprietor of this flourishing busi-
ness and retiring with a small competence. Mr. Applegarth, who is
(1920) the sole survivor of the " Junta " of 1867-71, still retains his
membership of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and his interest
in Trade Unionism, about which he has given us valuable documents and
remmiscences. See The Life of Robert Applegarth, by A. W. Humphrey,
1915.
238 The Junta and their Allies
lay a large measure of political shrewdness, and he shared
wdth his colleagues the capacity for deliberately concerted
action and personal subordination. His dilatory and un-
businessHke habits made him incapable of building up a
great organisation. Had he stood alone, he would have
added little to the strength of Trade Unionism ; as the loyal
adherent of the great officials and their popular mouth-
piece to the working-class world, Unionist and non-Unionist
alike, he gave the movement a wider basis, and attracted
into its ranks every ardent reformer belonging to the artisan
class. ^
It is difficult to-day to convey any adequate idea of the
extraordinary personal influence exercised by these five
men, not only on their immediate associates, but also as
interpreters of the Trade Union Movement, upon the pubHc
and the governing classes. For the first time in the century
^ Daniel Guile was born at Liverpool, October 21, 18 14, the son of a
shoemaker. Bound apprentice to an ironfounder in 1827, he joined the
Union in June 1834. In 1S63 he became its corresponding secretary, a
position he retained until his retirement at the end of 1881. He was a
member of the Parliamentary Committee, i87i-5,and died December 7, 1883.
George Odger, the son of a Cornish miner, was bom in 1820, at
Rouborough, near Tavistock, South Devon, and became a shoemaker at
an early age. Tramping about the country, as was then customary, he
eventually settled in London, becoming a prominent member of the
Ladies* Shoemakers' Society. His first important pubhc action was in
connection with the meetings of delegates of London trades on the build-
ing trades lock-out in 1859. On the formation ol the London Trades
Council in i860 he became one of its leading members, and from 1862
until the reconstruction of the Council in 1872 he acted as its secretary.
As one of the leaders of London working-class Radicalism he made five
attempts to get into Parhament, but was each time baulked by the opposi-
tion of the official Liberal party. At Chelsea in 1868, at Stratford in
1869, and at Bristol in 1870 he retired rather than spUt the vote, but at
South wark in 1870 he went to the poll, and failed of success only by
304 votes, the official Liberal, Sir Sidney Waterlow, being at the bottom
with 2966 votes as against 4382 given for Odger. At the General Election
of 1874 he again stood, to be once more opposed by both Liberals and
Conservatives with the same result as before. He died in 1877, his
funeral, which was attended by Professor E. Beesly, Professor Fawcett,
and Sir Charles Dilke, being made the occasion of a remarkable demonstra-
tion by the London working men. An eulogy of him by Professor Beesly
appeared in the Weekly Despatch, March 11, 1877. A brief biographical
sketch was pubhshed under the title of The Life and Labour of Georgt
Odger, 1877.
The Policy of the Junta 239
the working-class movement came under the direction, not
of middle and upper class S3niipathisers like Place, Owen,
Roberts, O'Connor, or Duncombe, but of genuine workmen
specially trained for the position. For the first time, more-
over, the leaders of working-class politics stood together
in a compact group, united by a close personal friendship,
and absolutely free from any trace of that suspiciousness
or disloyalty which have so often marred popular move-
ments. They brought to their task, it is true, no consis-
tent economic theory or political philosophy. They sub-
scribed with equal satisfaction to the crude Collectivism of
the " International," and the dogmatic industrial Indivi-
dualism of the English Radicals. This absence of a definite
basis to their pohtical activity accounts, we think, for the
drying up of Trade Union pohtics after their withdrawal.
We shall have occasion hereafter to notice other " defects
of their qualities," and the way in which these subsequently
stunted the further development of their own movement.
But it was largely their very limitations which made them,
at this particular crisis, such valuable representatives of
the Trade Union Movement. They accepted, with perfect
good faith, the economic Individualism of their middle-
class opponents, and claimed only that freedom to combine
wliich the more enlightened members of that class were
willing to concede to them. Their genuine if somewhat
restrained enthusiasm for pohtical and industrial freedom
gave them a persistency and determination which no check
could discourage. Their understanding of the middle-class
point of view, and their appreciation of the practical diffi-
culties of the situation, saved them from being mere dema-
gogues. For the next ten years, when it was all-important
to obtain a legal status for trade societies and to obliterate
the unfortunate impression created by the Sheffield outrages,
their qualities exactly suited the emergency. The posses-
sion of good manners, though it may seem a trivial detail,
was not the least of their advantages. To perfect self-
respect and integrity they added correctness of expression.
240 The Junta and their Allies
habits of personal propriet}', and a remarkable freedom
from all that savoured of the tap-room. In Allan and Apple-
garth, Guile, Coulson, and Odger, the traducers of Trade
Unionism found themselves confronted with a combination
of high personal character, exceptional business capacity,
and a large share of that official decorum which the English
middle class find so impressive.
Round these central personalities grouped themselves in
London a number of men of like temperament and aims.
We have already had occasion to mention T. J. Dunning,
of the Bookbinders, grown old in the service of Trade
Unionism. The building trades contributed a younger
generation, John Prior, George Howell, Henry Broadhurst,
and George Shipton. The whole group were in touch with
certain provincial leaders, who adhered to the new views,
and acted in close concert with the Junta. Of these, the
most noteworthy were Alexander Macdonald, then busily
organising the Miners' National Union, John Kane,^ of the
North of England Ironworkers, William Dronfield, the
Sheffield compositor, and Alexander Campbell, the leading
spirit of the Glasgow Trades Council.
The distinctive poHcy of the Junta was the combina-
tion of extreme caution in trade matters and energetic
agitation for political reforms. It is indeed somewhat
doubtful how far Allan and Applegarth, Coulson and Guile
shared the popular beUef that trade combinations could
effect a general rise of wages or resist a general reduction
in a falling market. They had more faith in the moral
force of great reserve funds, by the aid of which, dispensed
in liberal out-of-work donations, one capitahst, or even a
1 John Kane was born at Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1819. Sent
to work at seven, he served in various capacities until the age of fifteen,
when he moved to Newcastle-on-Tyne, and entered the ironworks of
Messrs. Hawke at Gateshead. Here he took part in the Chartist and
other progressive movements, making a vain attempt in 1842 to form a
Union in his trade. Not until 1863 was a durable society established,
and when in i868 the Amalgamated Ironworkers' Association was formed
on a national basis, John Kane became general secretary, a position he
retained until his death in March 1876.
Old-fashioned Unionism 241
whole group of capitalists, might be effectually prevented
from obtaining labour at anything but the standard condi-
tions. Their trade pohcy was, in fact, restricted to securing
for every workman those terms which the best employers
were willing voluntarily to grant. For this reason they were
constantly accused of apathy by those hotter spirits whose
idea of successful Trade Unionism was a series of general
strikes for advances or against reductions. The Junta were
really looking in another direction for the emancipation of
the worker. They believed that a levelling down of all
poUtical pri\'ileges, and the opening out of educational and
social opportunities to all classes of the community, would
bring in its train a large measure of economic eqiiality.
Under the influence of these leaders the London Unions,
and eventually those of the provinces, were drawn into a
whole series of pohtical agitations, for the Franchise, for
amendment of the Master and Servant law, for new Mines
Regulation Acts, for National Education, and finally for the
full legahsation of Trade Unions themselves.
Practical difficulties hampered the complete execution
of the Junta's pohcy. The use of the Trade Union organisa-
tion for Parhamentary agitation, on which Macdonald,
Applegarth, and Odger based all their expectations of
progress, came as a new idea to the Trade Union world.
The rank and file of Trade Unionists, still excluded from
the franchise, took practically no interest in any social or
pohtical reform, and regarded their trade combinations
exclusively as means of extorting a rise of wages or of com-
pelHng their fellow-workmen to join their clubs. This was
especially the case \vith the provincial organisations, where,
the officials usually shared the obscurantism of their
members. The " Manchester Order " of Bricklayers and the
General Union of Carpenters (headquarters, Manchester)
were, hke the Midland Brickmakers and the Sheffield Cutlers,
still wedded to the old ideas of secrecy and coercion, whilst
the powerful society of Masons, then centred at Leeds, held
aloof from the general movement. But this resistance was
242 The Junta and their Allies
not confined to the older societies, nor to those of any par-
ticular locaHty. All the Unions of that time, even those of
the Metropolis, retained a strong traditional repugnance to
political action. In many cases the rules expressly forbade
all mention of politics in their meetings. And although the
societies could be occasionally induced to take joint action
of a political character in defence of Trade Unionism itself,
not even the great influence of the Junta upon their own
Unions sufficed to persuade the members to turn their
organisations to account for legislative reform. The Junta
turned, therefore, to the newly established Trades Councils
and made these the political organs of the Trade Union
world.
The formation between 1858 and 1867 of permanent
Trades Councils in the leading industrial centres was an
important step in the consolidation of the Trade Union
Movement. Local delegate meetings, summoned to deal
with particular emergencies, had been a feature of Trade
Union organisation, at any rate since the beginning of
the nineteenth century. In early times every important
strike had its committee of sympathisers from other trade
societies, who collected subscriptions and rendered what
personal aid they could. But the most notable of these
committees were those which started up in aU the centres
of Trade Unionism when, the movement was threatened
by some particular legal or Parliamentary danger. Such
joint committees had in 1825 contributed powerfully to
defeat the re-enactment of the Combination Laws, in 1834
to arouse public feeling in the case of the Dorchester
labourers, and in 1838 to conduct the Trade Union case
before the Parliamentary Committee of that j-ear. But
these earlier committees were formed only for particular
emergencies, and had, so far as we know, no continuous
existence. By i860 permanent councils were in existence
in Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Edinburgh, and their
example was, in 1861, followed by the London trades.^
* The first permanent committee of the nature of a Trades CouuciJ
The London Trades Council 243
Like many provincial organisations, the London Trades
Council originated in a " Strike Committee." Dming the
appears to have been, according to our information, the Liverpool " Trades
Guardian Association," which was estabhshed in 1848 with the object of
protecting Trade Unions from suppression by the employers' use of the
criminal law. From its printed report and balance sheet for 1848, and
the references in the Fortnightly Circular of the Stonemasons' Society for
November 23, 1848, we gather that it took vigorous action to protect the
Sheffield razor-grinders from malicious prosecution, and to help the Liver-
pool masons who had been indicted for conspiracy. Of its activity from
1850 to 1857 we possess no records, but in August 1857 it subscribed
1^00 in aid of the Liverpool cabinetmakers, and in 1861 it was assisting
the London bricklayers' strike. In July of that year it was merged in a
" United Trades Protection Association," formed upon the model of the
newly established London Trades Council. In Glasgow there appears to
have been, since 1825, an almost continuous series of joint committees of
delegates for particular purposes. An attempt was made in 1851 to place
these on a permanent footing, but tlie trades soon ceased to send delegates.
A renewed attempt in 1858, made at the instance of Alexander Campbell,
met with greater success ; and the Council then established, composed
principally of the building trades, was in i860 enjoying a vigorous life.
Shefl&eld, too, had long had ephemeral federations of the local trades,
which came near having a continuous existence. One of these, the " Asso-
ciation of Organised Trades," estabhshed in 1857 with the special object
of assisting the Shef&eld Typographical Society in defending a libel action,
became the permanent Trades Council. Other towns, such as Dublin
and Bristol, had almost constantly some kind of Council of the local
trades. An appeal of the Trade Defence Association of Manchester,
signed by representatives of nine thousand operatives on behalf of the
dyers' strike, occurs in the Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular for 1854.
In London, as may be gathered from George Odger's evidence before the
Master and Servant Law Committee in 1867, the meetings of " Metro-
poUtan Trades Delegates " had been particularly frequent since 1848.
In 1852, for instance, as we discover from the Bookbinders' Trade Circular
(November 1853), a committee of the London trades took the case of
the Wolverhampton tinplate workers out of the hands of the somewhat
decrepit National Association of United Trades, and bore the whole cost
of these expensive legal proceedings. No sooner had the task of this
committee been completed, when another committee was formed to assist
the strike of the Preston cotton operatives. It was to this committee,
sitting at the BeU Inn, Old Bailey, the historic meeting-place of London
Trade Unionism, that Lloyd Jones, in March 1855, communicated his
fears that a certain Friendly Societies' Bill, then before the House of
Commons, would make the legal position of trade societies even more
equivocal than it then was. A " Metropohtan Trades Committee on the
Friendly Societies' Bill " was accordingly formed, the printed report of
which is reviewed by Dunning in his Circular for December 1855. From
this we learn that it was presided over by WilUam Allan, and that it
included his old friend William Newton, as well as the general secretaries
of the Stonemasons' and Bricklayers' Societies, and representatives of the
244 ^^^ Junta and their Allies
winter of 1859-60 weekly meetings of delegates from the
Metropolitan trades had been held to support the Building
Operatives in their resistance to the " document." " At
the termination of that memorable struggle," states the
Second Annual Report of the London Trades Council," it
was felt that something should be done to establish a general
trades committee so as to be able on emergency to call the
trades together with despatch for the purpose of rendering
each other advice or assistance as the circumstances
required." ^ In March i860 the provisional committee
formed with this object issued an " Address " to the trades,
which resulted, on July 10, i860, in the first meeting of
the present London Trades Council.
It is interesting to notice that the Council, at the outset,
was composed mainly of the representatives of the smaller
societies. The Executive Committee elected at its first
meeting included no delegates from the engineers, com-
positors, masons, bricklayers, or ironfounders, who were
then the most influential of the London Trade Societies.
The first action of the young Council affords a significant
indication of the feeling of isolation which led to its forma-
tion. In order to facilitate communications with other
trade societies throughout the kingdom it resolved to
compile a General Trades Union Directory, containing the
names and addresses of all Trade Union secretaries. This
Compositors and Bookbinders. It was supported by eighty-seven different
Trade Unions with forty-eight thousand members, who contributed a
halfpenny per member to cover tlie expenses. Its Parhamentary action
seems to have been vigorous and effective. The objectionable clauses
were, by skilful Parliamentary lobbying, dropped out of the Bill, and
what seemed at the time to be an important step towards the legislation
of trade societies was, through the help of Thomas Hughes and Lord
Goderich, secured. Between 1858 and 1867 Trades Councils were estab-
lished in about a dozen of the largest towns. The Trade Union expansion
of 1870-73 saw their number doubled. But their great increase was
one of the effects of the great wave of Trade Union organisation which
swept over the country in 1889-91, when over sixty new councils were
established, and those already in existence were reorganised and greatly
increased in membership.
* Second Annual Report of London Trades Council, March ji, 1862.
Payment by the Hour 245
praiseworthy enterprise took up all the attention of the
new bod}' for the first year, and the printing of two thousand
copies of the result of its work crippled its finances for long
afterwards. For, unfortunately, the General Trades Union
Directory, pubUshed at one shilling per copy, did not sell
and was, we fear, soon consigned to the pulping mill, as we
liave, after exhaustive search, been able to discover only two
copies in existence.^
But the direction of the Council was falling into abler
hands. In 1861 George Howell became secretary', to be
succeeded in the following year by George Odger, who for
the next ten years remained its most prominent member.
The Amalgamated Society of Engineers joined in 1861, and
the veteran Dunning brought over the old-established
Union of Bookbinders. By 1864, at any rate, the new
organisation was entirely dominated by the Junta. The
two " amalgamated " societies of Engineers and Carpenters
supplied, in some years, half its income. The great trade
friendly society of Ironfounders and the growing " London
Order " of Bricklayers sent their general secretaries to its
meetings. The Council became, in effect, a joint committee
of the officers of the large national societies. In the meetings
at the old Bell Inn, under the shadow of Newgate, we have
the beginnings of an informal cabinet of the Trade Union
world.
Meanwhile war had again broken out between the master
builders and their operatives, caused partly by a renewed
agitation for the Nine Hours Day, and partly by the
employers' desire to substitute payment by the hour for
the previous custom of paj-ment by the day.^ For the
^ No copy is preserved in the British Museum nor among the archives
of the Trades Council itself. Mr. Robert Applegarth kindly presented us
with a copy, which is now in the British Library of Political Science at
the London School of Economics. The only other one known to us is in
the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London.
* On receipt of a memorial from the operatives asking for the intro-
duction of the Nine Hours Day, three of the principal London builders
gave notice that henceforth they would engage their workmen, not bj-
the day, but by the hour. " This arrangement," they added, " of pa}^Tnent
246 The Junta and their Allies
historian of the general movement the dispute is chiefly
important as furnishing the occasion of the first interven-
tion of the talented group of young barristers and literary
men who, from this time forth, became the trusted legal
experts and political advisers of the leaders of the Trade
Union Movement. The workmen had totally failed to
make clear their objection to the Hour System, or even to
obtain a hearing of their case. Their position was, for the
first time, intelligibly explained in two brilliant letters
addressed to the newspapers by eight Positivists and Chris-
tian SociaKsts, which did much to bring about the tacit
compromise in which the struggle ended. ^
Of more immediate interest to us is the action taken by
the newly formed London Trades Council. Among the
building operations suspended by the dispute was the
by the hour will enable any workman employed by us to work any
number of hours he may think proper." This specious proposal involved
a total abandonment of the principle of Collective Bargaining. WTiat
the master builders proposed was, in effect, to do away with the very
conception of a normal day, and to revert, as far as the hours were con-
cerned, to separate contracts with each individual workman. The work-
men reahsed, what they failed clearly to explain, that the proffered free-
dom was illusory. In the modern organisation of industry on a large
scale there can be no freedom for the individual workman to drop his
tools at whatever moment he chooses. Without a concerted normal day,
each workman must inevitably find his task continue as long as the
engines are going or the works are open. The real question at issue was
how the common hours of labour should be fixed. The master builders
of 1861 rightly calculated that if each man was really free to earn as
many hours' wages in the day as they chose to offer him, the hours during
which the whole body would work would, in effect, be governed, not by
the general convenience, but by the desire and capacity of those willing
to work the longest day. On this, the essential issue, the men maintained
their position. The normal day in the London building trades was
tacitly fixed according to the prevailing custom, and has since been
repeatedly regulated and reduced by formal collective agreement until
the average working week throughout the year consists of less than 48
hours. The minor point of the unit of remuneration was gradually con-
ceded by the men, and the Hour System, guarded by strict limitation of
the working day, has come to be preferred by both parties.
* The letters were drawn up by Frederic Harrison and Godfrey Lush-
ington, after personal investigation and inquirj', and were signed also by
T. Hughes, J. M. Ludlow, E. S. Beesly, R. H. Hutton, R. B Litchfield,
and T. R. Bennett. They appeared in July 1861.
Trades Council Policy 247
constniction, by a large contractor, of th"e new Chelsea
barracks. The War Department saw no harm in per-
mitting him to engage the sappers of the Royal Engineers
to take the place of the men on strike. A similar course
had been taken by the Government in strikes of 1825 ^"^^
1834. But the Trade Unions were now too powerful to
allow of any such interference in their battles. A delegate
meeting of the London trades, comprising representatives
of fifty industries and fifty thousand operatives, sent a
deputation to the War Office. Sir George Cornwall Lewis
returned at first an equivocal answer, but the new Trades
Council proved the efficacy of Parliamentary agitation by
getting question^ put to the Minister in the House of
Commons, and stirring up enough feeling to compel him to
withdraw the troops.
The minute-books of the London Trades Council from
i860 to 1867 present a mirror of the Trade Union history
of this period. Odger had the rare gift of making his
minutes interesting, and he describes, in his terse but
graphic English, all the varied events of the Labour Move-
ment as they were brought before the Council. In 1861-62,
for instance, we see the Council trying vainly to settle the
difficult problem of " overlap " between the trades of the
shipwrights and the iron-shipbuilders ; we notice the
shadow cast by the Lancashire cotton famine, and we read
indignant resolutions condemning the Sheffield outrages of
those years. But the special interest of these minutes lies
in their unconscious revelation of the way in which the
Council became the instrument of the new policy of partici-
pation in general politics. Under Odger's influence the
Council took a prominent part in organising the popular
welcome to Garibaldi, and in 1862 it held a great meeting
in St. James's Hall in support of the struggle of the Northern
States against negro slavery, at which John Bright was
the principal speaker. In 1864 the Junta placed itself
definitely in opposition to the " Old Unionists," who
objected to all connection between the Government and the
248 The Junta and their Allies
concerns of working men. W. E. Gladstone, who was then
Chancellor of the Exchequer, had introduced a Bill enabling
the Post Office to sell Government Annuities for small
amounts. Against this harmless project George Potter, the
leading opponent of the Junta, summoned great public
meetings of the London trades, enlisted on liis side the
Operative Stonemasons and other provincial organisations,
and vehemently denounced the Bill as an insidious attempt
to divert the savings of working men from their Trade
Unions and benefit societies into an exchequer controlled
by the governing classes. The London Trades Council sent
an influential deputation to Gladstone pubHcly to disavow
the action of Potter, and to welcome the proposal of the
Government to utilise the administrative organisation for
the advantage of the working class. Of more significance
was the alteration of the Council's policy with regard to
political reform. The early members had set themselves
against the introduction of politics in any guise whatso-
ever, and during the years 1861-62 Howell and Odger strove
in vain to enlist the Council in the agitation for a new
Reform Bill. But in 1866, under the influence of Odger
and Applegarth, Allan and Coulson, the Council enthusi-
astically threw itself into the demonstration in favour of
the Reform Bill brought in by the Liberal Government,
and took a leading part in the agitation which resulted in
the enfranchisement of the town artisan.^ In the same
year the Council agreed to co-operate with the " Inter-
national " in demanding Democratic Reform from all
European Governments.
The widely advertised public action of the London
Trades Council excited considerable interest in provincial
centres of Trade Unionism. We see the Council in frequent
^ Many of the local Birmingham Trade Unions became directly affiliated
to the National Reform League. But with the exception of two small
clubs at Wolverliampton, and the West End Cabinetmakers (London),
no other Trade Union appears to have joined the League in a corporate
capacity, though its Council included Allan, Applegarth. Coulson, Cremer,
Odger Potter, and Conolly.
The Master and Servant Act 249
correspondence with similar bodies at Glasgow, Nottingham,
Sheffield, and other provincial towns, and often exercising
a kind of informal leadership in general movements. But
it would be unfair to ascribe the whole initiative in legis-
lative reform to the London officials. Under the brilliant
leadership of Alexander Macdonald, whose work we shall
hereafter describe, the force of the coal - miners was
being marshalled for Parhamentary agitation ; and Mac-
donald's friend, Alexander Campbell, was bringing the
Glasgow Trades Council round to the new policy.
And it was Campbell and Macdonald, working through
these organisations, who carried through the most
important Trade Union achievement of the next few
years, the amendment of the law relating to master and
servant.
It is difficult in these days, when equality of treatment
before the law has become an axiom, to understand how
the flagrant injustice of the old Master and Servant Acts
seemed justifiable even to a middle-class Parliament. If
an employer broke a contract of service, even wilfully and
without excuse, he was hable only to be sued for damages,
or, in the case of wages under £10, to be summoned before
a court of summary jurisdiction, which could order pajnnent
of the amount due. The workman, on the other hand, who
wilfully broke his contract of service, either by absenting
himself from his emplojonent, or by leaving his work, was
hable to be proceeded against for a criminal offence, and
punished by three rhonths' imprisonment. This inequahty
of treatment was, moreover, aggravated by various other
anomahes. It followed by the general law of evidence that,
whilst a master sued by a servant could be witness in his
own favour, the servant prosecuted by his employer could
not give evidence on his own behalf ; and it frequently
happened that no ot^er evidence than the employer's could
be produced. It was in the power of a single justice of the
peace, on an information on oath, to issue a warrant for the
summary arrest of the workman, who thus found himself.
250 The Junta and their Allies
when a dispute occurred, suddenly seized, even in his bed,*
and haled to prison at the discretion of a magistrate, who
was in many cases himself an employer of labour. The
case was heard before a single justice of the peace, and the
hearing might take place at his private house. The only
punishment that could be inflicted was imprisonment, the
law not allowing the alternative of a fine or the payment
of damages. From the decision of the justice, however
arbitrary, there was no appeal. Finally, it must be added,
the sentence of imprisonment was no discharge for a debt,
so that a workman was liable to be imprisoned over and
over again for the same breach of contract. ^
^ The obligation to proceed by warrant was at first universal, as the
Act of 1824, 4 Geo. IV. c. 34, gave the magistrate no discretion. By
that act the master was to be served with a summons at the instance of
the workman, whilst the workman was to be arrested on a warrant on
the complaint upon oath of the master. But, in 1848, Jervis's Act, 11
& 12 Vic. c. 43, gave justices power in all cases to issue a summons in
the first instance. The practice was accordingly gradually introduced in
England of summoning the workman ; and the issue of a warrant was in
general confined to cases ui which the workman had gone away, or had
failed to appear to a summons. Jervis's Act, however, did not apply to
Scotland, so that summary arrests of workmen on warrants continued
until 1867 ; and this was one of the principal grievances adduced by the
Glasgow representatives. Even in England warrants were occasionally
granted by vindictive magistrates. In 1863 a dispute took place at a
Durham colliery, and the employer proceeded against the miners under
the Master and Servant Law. " In the middle of the next night twelve
of them were taken out of their beds by the police and lodged in Durham
lock-up, on the charge of deserting their work without notice " (Letter
by Professor E. S. Beesly in Spectator, December 12, 1863).
^ See Question 864, Master and Servant Law Select Committee," 1866 ;
Unwin v. Clarke, i Law Reports, Queen's Bench, p. 417; and Second
Report of Labour Laws Commission, c. 1157 (1875), p. 7.
The enactments renderin;; the workman liable to imprisonment for
simple breach of a contract uf service are historically to be traced to the
period when the law denied to the labourer the right to withhold his
service or to bargain as to his wages. Any neglect or abandonment of
his work was, therefore, like a simple refusal to work at all, a breach,
not so much of contract, as of a duty arising out of status and enforced
by statute. Tiie law on the subject dates, indeed, back to the celebrated
Statute of Labourers of 1349 (23 Ed. III.), the primary object of which
was to enforce service at the rates of hiring that existed prior to the
Black Death. The second section of this law enacts that if a workman
or servant depart from service before the time agreed upon he shall be
imprisoned. The same principle was asserted in the Statute of Appren-
Legal Persecution 251
Early in 1863 Alexander Campbell ^ brought the Master
tices in 1563 (5 Eliz. c. 4), which consoUdated the law relating to all
artificers and labourers, and expressly applied it to workers by the piece,
who were rendered hable to imprisonment if they left before completing
their job. During the eighteenth century, which abounded, as we have
seen, in enactments dealing with particular trades, a long series of statutes
made the provisions of law more definite and stringent in the industries
in question. The principal English Acts were 7 Geo. 1. st. i, c. 13
(tailors) ; 9 Geo. I. c. 27 (shoemakers) ; 13 Geo. II. c. 8 (all leather trades) ;
20 Geo. II c. 19; 27 Geo. II. c. 6 ; 31 Geo. II. c. 11 (various trades);
6 Geo. III. c. 25 (agreements for a term) ; 17 Geo. III. c. 56 (textiles,
etc.) ; 39 & 40 Geo. III. c. 77 (coal and iron) ; 4 Geo. IV. c. 34 (all trades) ;
10 Geo. IV. c. 52 (general) ; 6 & 7 Vic. c. 40 (textiles).
The intolerable oppression which these laws enabled unscrupulous
employers to commit was, at the beginning of the century, scarcely in-
ferior to that brought about by the Combination Laws. This was strongly
urged by the authors of A few Remarks on the State of the Laws at present
in existence for regulating Masters and Workpeople (preserved among the
Place MSS. 27804), which George White, the prompter of Peter Moore,
M.P., pubUshed in 1823. The pieceworker clause of the. Statute of
Apprentices was particularly oppressive. "This clause," says White,
" has been much abused, as in many businesses they never finish their
work, as the nature of the employment is such that they are compelled
to begin one before they finish another, as wheelwrights, japanners, and
an infinite number of trades ; therefore if any dispute ariseth respecting
the amount of wages, and a strike or turn-out commences, or men leave
their work, having words, the master prosecutes them for leaving their
work unfinished. Very few prosecutions have been made to effect under
the Combination Acts, but hundreds have been made under this law,
and the labourer or workman can never be free, unless this law is modified.
The Combination Act is nothing : it is the law which regards the finishing
of work which masters employ to harass and keep down the wages of
their workpeople ; unless this is modified nothing is done, and by re-
peahng the Combination Acts you leave the workman in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred in the same state you found him — at the mercy
of his master" (p. 51). But, in spite of this somewhat exaggerated
protest, neither Place nor Hume took up the amendment of the law
relating to contracts of service. Their paramount concern was to secure
for the workman freedom to enter into a contract, and oppressive punish-
ment for its breach attracted, for the moment, Uttle attention.
Besides White's Manual, the following may be referred to for the
history of the law, and of its amendment : Report of Conference on the
Law of Master and Workman under the Contract of Service (Glasgow,
1864) ; the Reports of the Select Committee on the Law of Master and
Servant, 1866, and of the Royal Commission on the Labour Laws, 1875 ;
The Labour Laws, by James Edward Davis (1875) ; and Stephen's History
of the Criminal Law, vol. iii.
^ Alexander Campbell, who had been a prominent disciple of Robert
Owen, and whom we have already seen as secretary to the little Glasgow
Carpenters' Union of 1834, was. in 1863, editing the Glasgow Sentinel,
252 The Junta and their Allies
and Servant Law under the notice of the Glasgo^v Trades
Council. A Parliamentary Return was obtained showing
that the enormous number of 10,339 cases of breach of
contract of service came before the courts in a single year,
A committee was formed to agitate for the amendment of
the law, and communication was opened up, not only with
the London leaders, but also with sympathisers in other
provincial towns. The Trades Councils of London, Bristol,
Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Edinburgh were
formally invited to unite in a combined movement. In
Leeds and elsewhere local Trades Councils were established
for the express purpose of forwarding the agitation ; and
15,000 copies of a " Memorial of Information intended »for
the use of such workmen as fall under the provisions of the
Statute 4 Geo. IV. c. 34 " ^ were circulated to all the leading
workmen- throughout the country. At the instance of
Campbell and Macdonald, the Glasgow Trades Council con-
vened a conference of Trade Union representatives to con-
sider how the object of the agitation could best be secured.
This Conference, which was held in London during four
days of May 1864, marks an epoch in Trade Union history.
For the first time a national meeting of Trade Union
delegates was spontaneously convened by a Trade Union
organisation to discuss a purely workman's question, in
the presence of working men alone. The number of dele-
gates did not exceed twenty, but these included the leading
officials of all the great national and amalgamated Unions.^
which became the chief organ of Macdonald and his National Association
of Miners. Campbell is described as having been, in 1858, the virtual
founder of the Glasgow Trades Council.
^ The Memorial, which contains an exact statement of the law and
suggestions for its amendment, is preserved in the Flint Glass Makers'
Magazine, December 1863.
- Among those present were Robert Applegarth, George Odger,
Daniel Guile, T. J. Dunning, Alexander Macdonald, William Dronfield,
Alexander Campbell, Edwin Coulson, and George Potter. The societies
represented included the London Trades Council, Glasgow Trades Com-
mittee, Shefilield Association of Organised Trades, Liverpool United Trades
Protection Society, Nottingham Association of Organised Trades, and the
Northumberland and Durham United Trades and Labourers ; tlie Amal-
A Parliamentary Success 253
The transactions of the Conference were thoroughly
businesslike. Three members of the Government were
, asked to receive deputations ; a large number of members
of Parliament were " lobbied " on the subject of an im-
mediate amending Bill ; and finally a successful meeting
of legislators was held in the " tea-room " of the House
of Commons itself, at which the delegates impressed their
desires upon all the friendly members. The terms of the
draft Bill were settled ; Cobbett agreed to introduce it in
the House of Commons, and the Glasgow Trades' Com-
mittee was authorised to support it by an agitation on
behalf of all the Trade Unions of the kingdom.
The Bill introduced by Cobbett never became law ; but
a vigorous agitation kept the matter under the notice of
Parliament, and in 1866 a Select Committee was appointed
to inquire into the subject. Upon its report Lord Elcho ^
succeeded, in 1867, in carrying through Parliament a Bill
which remedied the grossest injustice of the law. The
Master and Servant Act of 1867 (30 & 31 Vic. c. 141),
the first positive success of the Trade Unions in the legis-
lative field, did much to increase their confidence in Parlia-
mentary agitation.
But whilst the Junta and their alhes were, by the
capture of the Trades Councils, using the Trade Union
organisation for an active political campaign, their steady
discouragement of aggressive strikes was bringing down
lipon them the wrath of the " Old Unionists " of the time.
It was one of the principal functions of the London Trades
Council to grant " credentials " to trade societies having
disputes on hand, recommending them for the support of
workmen in other trades. As these credentials were not
confined to London disputes, the custom placed the Council
under the invidious necessity of either giving its sanction
gamated Societies of Engineers and Carpenters, the National Societies of
Bricklayers, Masons, Ironfounders, Miners, and Bookbinders, the London
Society of Compositors, the Scottish Bakers, Sheffield Sawmakers, etc.
* Afterwards Earl of Wemyss.
254 ^^^^ Junta and their Allies
to, or withholding approval from, practically every import-
ant strike in the kingdom — an arrangement which quickly
brought the Council into conflict with the more aggressive
societies. In two cases especially the divergence of policy
raised serious and heated discussions. A building trades
strike had broken out in the Midlands at the beginning of
1864, initiated by the old Friendly Society (now styled the
General Union) of Operative Carpenters. The men's action
was strongly disapproved by Applegarth and the Executive
of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters. The London
Trades Council unhesitatingly took Applegarth's view,
thereby alienating whole sections of the building trades,
whose local trade clubs and provincial societies had retained
much of the spirit of the Builders' Union of 1834. ^^^ the
internal dissension arising from the carpenters' dispute fell
far short of that brought about by the strike of the Stafford-
shire puddlers. It is unnecessary to go into the details of
this angry struggle against a 10 per cent reduction. The
conduct of the men in refusing the arbitration offered by
the Earl of Lichfield met with the disapproval of the London
Trades Council. The hotter spirits were greatly incensed
at the Council's moderation. George Potter, in particular,
distinguished himself by addressing excited meetings of the
men on strike, advising them to stand firm.
Potter, who figures largely in the newspapers of this
time, was in fact endeavouring to work up a formidable
opposition to the pohcy of the Junta. After the building
trades disputes of 1859-60, in which he had taken a leading
part, he had started the Beehive, a weekly organ of the Trade
Union world. Himself a member of a tiny trade club of
London carpenters, he was bitterly opposed to Applegarth
and the Amalgamated Society, and from 1864 onward we
find him at the head of every outbreak of disaffection. An
expert in the arts of agitation and of advertisement, Potter
occasionally cut a remarkable figure, so that the unwary
reader, not of the Beehive only, but also of the Times,
might easily believe him to have been the most influential
George Potter 255
leader of the working-class movement. As a matter of
fact, he St no time represented any genuine trade organisa-
tion, the " Working Men's Association," of which he was
president, being an unimportant society of nondescript
persons. However, from 1864 to 1867 we find him calling
frequent meetings of delegates of the London trades to
denounee the Junta, and their instrument, the London Trades
Council. The minutes of the latter body contain abun-
dant evidence of the bitter feelings caused by these attacks,
and make clear the essential difference between the two
policies. At a special meeting called to condemn Potter's
action, Howell, Allan, Coulson, and Applegarth enlarged
upon the evil consequences of irresponsible agitation in
trade disputes ; and Danter, the outspoken president of
the Amalgamated Engineers, emphatically declared that
Potter " had become the aider and abettor of strikes. He
thought of nothing else ; he followed no other business ;
strikes were his bread-and-cheese ; in short, he was a strike-
jobber, and he made the Beehive newspaper his instrument
for pushing his nose into every imfortunate dispute that
sprang up." ^
Responsible and cautious leadership of the Trade Union
Movement was becoming increasingly necessary. The
growth of the great national Unions, alike in wealth and
in membership, and the manner in which they subscribed
in aid of each other's battles, had aroused the active enmity
of the employers. To coimteract the men's renewed
strength, the employers once more banded themselves
into powerful associations, and made use of a new weapon.
The old expedient of the " document " had, since its failure
to break down the Amalgamated Engineers in 1852, and
to subdue the building operatives in 1859, fallen somewhat
into discredit. It was now reinforced by the general
" lock-out " of aU the men in a particular industry, even
those who accepted the employer's terms, in order to
reduce to subjection the recalcitrant employees of one or
1 Minutes of meeting of London Trades Council, March 1864.
256 The J unta and their Allies
two firms only.^ The South Yorkshire coal-owners especially
distinguished themselves during those years by their frequent
use of the " lock-out." One Yorkshire miner complained
in 1866 that he had been " locked out abodt twenty-four
months in six years." ^ During the year 1865 it seemed as
if the lock-outs were about to become a feature of every
large industry, the most notable instances being those of
the Staffordshire ironworkers, to which we have already
alluded, and the shipbuilding operatives on the Clyde. In
both these cases large sections of the men were willing to
work at the employers' terms, but were either known to
belong to a Union or suspected of contributing to the men
on strike. But though this practice of " locking out "
created great excitement among working men, it did not
achieve the employers' aim of breaking up the Unions.
Nothing but absolute suppression by law appeared open to
those who regarded trade combinations as " a poisonous
plant " and an " anomalous anachronism," and who were
vainly looking to " the happy period," both for masters and
men, when the questions, " What is the price of a quarter
of wheat ? " and " What is the price of a workman's day
wage ? " shall be settled on the same principles.^
Nor were the employers the only people who began to
talk once more of putting down Trade Unions by law.
The industrial dislocation which the lock-outs, far more than
the strikes, produced occasioned widespread loss and public
inconvenience. The quarrels of employer and employed
came to be vaguely regarded as matters of more than
private concern. Unfortunately a handle was given to the
enemies of Trade Unionism by the continuance of outrages,
committed in the interest of Trade Unions, which began to
be widely advertised by the press. Isolated cases of violence
^ It must not be supposed that the lock-out was a new invention.
Place describes its use by the master breeches-makers at the end of the
last century : Life of Francis Place, by Professor Graham Wallas (1918).
* Report of Conference of Trade Delegates at Sheffield (June 1S66), p. 22.
* " An Ironmaster's View of Strikes," by W. R. Hopper, Fortnightly
Review (August i, 1865).
The Sheffield Outrages 257
and intimidation, restricted, as we shall hereafter see, to
certain trades and locaUties, were magnified by press
rumours into a systematic attempt on the part of the
Trade Unions generally to obtain their ends by dehberate
physical violence. In the general fear and disapproval the
public failed to discriminate between the petty trade clubs
of Sheffield and such great associations as the Amalgamated
Engineers and Carpenters. The commercial objection to
industrial disputes became confused with the feeUng of
abhorrence created by the idea of vast combinations of
men sticking at neither violence nor murder to achieve
their ends. The " terrorism of Trade Unions " became a
nightmare. " On one side," says a writer who represents
the pubhc feehng of the time, " is arrayed the great mass
of the talent, knowledge, virtue, and wealth of the country,
and, on the other, a number of unscrupulous men, leading
a half-idle life, and feeding on the contributions of their
dupes, and on a tax levied on such of the intelligent artisans
as are forced into their ranks, but who would be only too
happy to throw off their thraldom and join the supporters
of law and justice, did these but offer them adequate
protection." ^
The Trade Unions world seems to have been quite
unconscious of the gathering storm. In June 1866 138
delegates, representing all the great Unions, and a total
membership of about 200,000, met at Sheffield to devise
some defence against the constant use of the lock-out. The
student of the proceedings of this conference wiU contrast
with wonder the actual conduct of the Trade Union leaders
with the denunciations to which these " few unscrupulous
men " were at this time exposed. Nothing could be more
worthy, even from the middle-class point of view, than the
discussions of these representative workmen, who denounced
^ "Measures for Putting an End to the Abuses of Trades Unions,"
by Frederic Hill, Barrister-at-Law : Paper in Sessional Proceedings of
the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1867-68,
p. 24. The popular middle-class sentiment is reflected in Charles Reade's
novel. Put Yourself in his Place (1871).
K
258 The Junta and their Allies
with equal energy the readiness with wliich their impetuous
followers came out on strike and the arbitrary lock-out of
the masters, and whose resolutions express their desire for
the estabhshment of Councils of Conciliation and the general
resort to arbitration in industrial disputes.^ Meanwhile, in
order to meet the great federations of employers, they
formed " The United Kingdom Alliance of Organised
Trades," to support the members of any trade who should
find themselves " locked out " by their employers. ^ Un-
fortunately the conference utterly failed to decide what
constituted a " lock-out," as distinguished from a strike ;
and the " Judicial Council " of the Alliance, consistijig of
one delegate from each of the nine districts into which the
kingdom was divided, found itself continually at issue with
its constituents as to the disputes to be supported. This
friction co-operated with the increasing depression of trade
in causing the calls for funds to be very unwillingly responded
to ; and the Executive Committee, sitting at Sheffield, had
seldom any cash at its command. The Alliance lingered on
until about the end of 1870, when the defection of its last
important Unions brought it absolutely to an end.^ In
^ See, for instance, the speech of George Newton, the secretary of the
Glasgow Trades Committee : "A great many strikes, and perhaps lock-
outs, too, have arisen from a stubborn refusal on the part of both sides
to look the question honestly and fairly in the face. . . . Let us examine
ourselves and see if there be any wicked way in us that contributes to
this unsatisfactory state of things, and if we discover that we are not
blameless, then we ought, first of all, to set our own house in order. . . .
Then let us examine the opposite side of the camp and see how they
stand, and if we find that they have not done all that they ought to have
done with a view to prevent these serious evils, let us undisguisedly and
in plain language point out where we consider they have erred, and by
increasing public opinion in a healthy way against tyranny — some people
call it, but perhaps a milder word would be better — against the unwise
pohcy used, it will do much to repress it in future " (Conference Report,
Sheffield, 1866).
* Rules adopted at Manchester Conference, 1867 (Sheffield, 1867,
12 pp.).
3 The Alliance was always administered by an executive elected by
the Sheffield trades, the leading men amongst which had been active in
its formation. The veteran secretary of the Typographical Society,
William Dronfield, was the first general secretary. Among the trades
represented were the South Yorkshire and Nottingham Miners, the Araal-
Rattening 259
1866, however, the Alliance was young and hopeful. It
received its first blow in October of this year, when it and
the Trade Union Conference were forgotten in the sensa-
tion produced by the explosion of a can of gunpowder in a
workman's house in New Hereford Street, Sheffield.
This outrage was only one of a class of crimes for
which Sheffield was already notorious. But in the state
of pubhc irritation against Trade Unionism, which had
been growing during the past few years of lock-outs and
strikes, the news served to precipitate events. On all sides
there arose a cry for a searching investigation into Trade
Unionism. The Trade Unions themselves joined in the
demand. As no clue to the perpetrators of the last crime
could be discovered by the local pohce, the leaders of the
Shefiield trade clubs united with the Town Council and the
local Employers' Association in pressing for a Government
inquiry. The London Trades Council and the Executive
of the Amalgamated Engineers sent a joint deputation to
Sheffield to investigate the case. The deputation discovered
no more than the local pohce had done about the perpe-
trators of the crime, and therefore innocently reported that
there was no evidence of Trade Union compUcity ; but
they accompanied this report by a strong condemnation of
" the abominable practice of rattening, which is calculated
gamated Tailors, Boilermakers, Cotton-spinners, Scottish Associated
Carpenters, Yorkshire Glass-bottle Makers, North of England Iron-
workers, and the trades of Wolverhampton. The minute books from
1867 to 1870, and its printed Monthly Statement, show that the AUiance
at first supported the men in numerous lock-outs, especially among the
tailors, miners, and ironworkers, but that there were constant complaints
of unpaid levies. Dronfield informed us that the Judicial Committee and
the Executive experienced great difficulties from the absence of any
control over the constituent Unions, and the impossibility of accurately
defining a lock-out. The first conference of the Alliance was held at
Manchester from the ist to the 4th of January 1867, when fifty-three
trades had been enrolled, numberiifg 59,750 members. The " Rules "
adopted at this conference contain an interesting address by Dronfield
upon the principles and objects of the federation. The next conference
was at Preston in September 1867, when the membership had fallen to
23,580, in forty-seven trades, the Boilermakers, among others, formally
withdrawing (Minutes of Conference at Preston, Sheffield, 1867, 16 pp.).
26o The Jjinta and their Allies
to demoralise those who are concerned in it, and to bring
disgrace on all trade combinations." ' Public meetings of
Trade Unionists were held throughout the country, at
which the leaders expressed their indignation both at the
outrage itself and at the common assumption that it was a
usual and necessary incident of Trade Unionism. These
meetings invariably concluded with a demand on behalf of
the Trade Unionists to be allowed an opportunity of refuting
the accusations of the enemies of the movement. Robert
Applegarth saw the Home Secretary on the subject, and
suggested a Commission of Inquiry. The appointment of
a Roj'al Commission of Inquiry was officially announced in
the Queen's Speech of February 1867. That the Govern-
ment meant business was proved by the prompt intro-
duction of a Bill empowering the Commission to pursue its
investigations by exceptional means. The inquiry was to
extend to all outrages during the past ten years, whether
in Sheffield or elsewhere. Not only were accomplices in
criminal acts promised an indemnity, provided that they
^ The town of Sheffield had long been noted for the custom of "ratten-
ing," that is, the temporary abstraction of the wheelbands or tools of a
workman whose subscription to his club was in arrear. This had become
the recognised method of enforcing, not merely the payment Of contribu-
tions, but also compliance with the trade regulations of the club. The
lawless summary jurisdiction thus usurped by the Sheffield clubs easily
passed into more serious acts of lynch law if mere rattening proved in-
effectual. Recalcitrant workmen were terrorised by explosions of cans
of gunpowder in the troughs of their grinding wheels, or thrown down
their chimneys ; and in some cases these explosions caused serious injury.
The various Grinders' Unions (saw, file, sickle, fork, and fender) enjoyed
an unliappy notoriety for outrages of this nature, which had, from time
to time, aroused the spasmodic indignation of the local press, notably in
1843-4. An attempt, in iS6i, to blow up a small warehouse in Acorn
Street provoked a special outburst of public disapproval ; and the
minutes of tlie London Trades Council record that already on this occasion
the Council publicly expressed its abhorrence of such criminal violence.
After this date there was for three or four years a diminution in the
number of serious acts of violence committed ; but the years 1865-6 saw
a renewal of the evil practices, especially in connection with the Saw-
(}rinders' Union. The explosion in New Hereford Street in October
1866 was afterwards proved to have been instigated by this Union in
order to terrorise a certain Thomas Femehough, who had twice deserted
the society, and was at the time working for a firm against whom the
saw-handle makers, as well as the saw-grinders, had struck.
Trade Union Funds 261
gave evidence, but the same privilege was extended to the
actual perpetrators of the crimes. The investigation, more-
over, was not restricted to the supposed criminal practices
of particular trade clubs, but was to embrace the whole
subject of Trade Unionism and its effects.
The Trade Union movement thus found itself for the
third time at the bar of a Parhamentar}^ inquiry at a moment
when pubHc opinion, as well as the enmity of employers,
had been strongly excited against it. At the very height
of this crisis, which had been brought about by the violence
of some of the old-fashioned Unions, the new Amalgamated
Societies themselves received a serious check from a decision
of the Court of Queen's Bench.
The formation of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
with its large accumulated funds, had renewed the anxiety
of the Trade Union officials as to the extent to which a
trade society enjoyed the protection of the law. Although
the Act of 1825 had made trade societies, as such, no longer
unlawful, nothing had been done to give them any legal
status, or to enable them to take proceedings as corporate
entities. But in 1855 a- " MetropoUtan Trades Committee "
succeeded in getting a clause intended to relate to Trade
Unions inserted in the Friendly Societies Act of that year.
By the 44th section of this Act it was provided that a
society estabhshed for any purpose not illegal might, by
depositing its rules with the Registrar of Friendly Societies,
enjoy the privilege of having disputes among its own mem-
bers summarily dealt with by the magistrates. Under this
provision several of the larger societies had deposited their
rules, beUeving, with the concurrence of the Registrar, that
this secured to them the power to proceed summarily
against any member who should, in his capacity of secretary
or treasurer, detain or make away with the society's funds. ^
So thoroughly has the legality of their position been accepted
1 Among other societies, the Amalgamated Engineers and Carpenters
and the national Unions of Boilermakers and Ironfounders appear to have
deposited their rules.
262 The Junta and their Allies
by all concerned, that on the estabhshment by Gladstone
of the Post Office Savings Banks in 1861, he had, at the
request of the Trade Union leaders, expressly conceded to
the Unions, equally with the Friendly Societies, the privilege
of making use of the new banks.
This feeling of security was, in 1867, completely shattered.
The Boilermakers' Society had occasion to proceed against
the treasurer of their Bradford branch for wrongfully with-
holding the sum of £24 ; but the magistrates, to the general
surprise of all concerned, held that the society could not
proceed under the Friendly Societies Act, being, as a Trade
Union, outside the scope of that measure. The case was
thereupon carried to the Court of Queen's Bench, where
four judges, headed by the Lord Chief Justice, confirmed
the decision, giving the additional reason that the objects
of the Union, if not, since 1825, actually criminal, were yet
so far in restraint of trade as to render the society an illegal
association. Thus the officers of the great national Trade
Unions found their societies deprived of the legal status
which they imagined they had acquired, and saw them-
selves once more destitute of any legal protection for tlieir
accumulated funds.
The grounds of the decision went a great deal further
than the decision itself. As was pointed out to the work-
men by Frederic Harrison, " the judgement lays down not
merely that certain societies have failed to bring themselves
within the letter of a certain Act, but that Trade Unions,
of whatever sort, are in their nature contrary to public
policy, and that their object in itself will vitiate every
association and every transaction into which it enters. . . .
In a word. Unionism becomes (if not according to the
suggestion of the learned judge — criminal) at any rate
something like betting and gambling, public nuisances and
immoral considerations — things condemned and suppressed
by the law." ^
Trade Unionism was now at bay, assailed on both sides.
* Beehive, January 26, 1867.
Organisation of the Defence 263
It was easy to foresee that the employers and their aUies
would make a determined attempt to use the Royal Com-
mission and the Sheffield outrages to suppress Trade
Unionism by the criminal law. On the other hand, the
hard-earned accumulations of the larger societies, by this
time amounting to an aggregate of over a quarter of a million
sterhng, were at the mercy of their whole army of branch
secretaries and treasurers, any one of whom might embezzle
the funds with impunity.
The crisis was too serious to be dealt with by the
excited delegate meetings of the London Trades Council.
For over four years we hear of only occasional and purely
formal meetings of this body. Immediately on the pubh-
cation of the decision of the judges in January 1867
Applegarth convened what was called a " Conference of
Amalgamated Trades," but what consisted in reahty of
weekly private meetings of the five leaders and a few other
friends. From 1867 to 1871 this " conference " acted as
the effective cabinet of the Trade Union Movement. Its
private minute-book, kept by Applegarth, reveals to the
student the whole poKtical Hfe of the Trade Union world.
The first action of the Junta was to call to their councils
those middle-class allies upon whose assistance and advice
they had learned to rely. We have already noticed the
adhesion of the " Christian Sociahsts " to the Amalgamated
Engineers in 1852, and the intervention of the Positivists in
the Building Trades disputes of 1859-61. Frederic Harrison
and E. S. Beesly were now rendering specially valuable
services as the apologists for Trade Unionism in the pubhc
press. " Tom Hughes " was in Parliament, almost the only
spokesman of the men's whole claim. Henry Crompton
was bringing his acute judgement and his detailed experience
of the actual working of the law to bear upon the dangers
which beset the Unions in the Courts of Justice. Apple-
garth's minutes show how frequently all four were ready to
spend hours in private conference at the Engineers' office
in Stamford Street, and how unreservedly they, in this
264 The Junta and their Allies
crisis, placed their professional skill at the disposal of the
Trade Union leaders. It would be difficult to exaggerate
the zeal and patient devotion of these friends of Trade
Unionism, or the service which they rendered to the cause
in its hour of trial. ^
It is obvious from the private transactions of the con-
ference that the main object of the Junta was to gain for
Trade Unionism that legal status which was necessary alike
to the security of the funds and to the recognition of the
Trade Union organisation as a constituent part of the State.
But the first thing to be done was to defeat the employers
in their endeavour to use the Royal Commission as an
instrument for suppressing Trade Unionism by direct penal
enactment. The Junta had therefore not only to dissociate
themselves from the ignorant turbulence of the old-fashioned
Unions, but also to prove that the bulk of their own members
were enlightened and respectable. It was, moreover, of the
utmost importance to persuade the pubUc that the Junta
and their friends, not the strike- jobbers or the outrage-
mongers, were the authorised and typical representatives of
the Trade Union Movement. All this it was necessary to
bring out in the inquiry by the Royal Commission before
which Trade Unionism was presently to stand on its defence.
The composition of the Commission was accordingly a matter
of the greatest concern for the Junta. The Government
had resolved to select, as Commissioners, not representa-
tives of each view, but persons presumably impartial, with
Sir William Erie, who had lately retired from the Lord
Chief Justiceship of the Common Pleas, as their chairman.
In this arrangement representatives of the employers were
to be excluded ; and the appointment of working men was
not dreamed of. The Commission was to be made up
^ Along with these, in helping and advising the Trade Unions at this
time, were Vernon Lushington, Godfrey Lushington (afterwards Per-
manent Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department), J. M.
Ludlow (afterwards Registrar of Friendly Societies), Neate (formerly
Professor of Political Economy and then M.P. for Oxford), Sir T. Fowell
Buxton. M.P., and A. J. Mundella.
The Royal Commission 265
chiefly from the ranks of high officials, with four members
from the two Houses of Parhament, and the chairman of
a great industrial undertaking. The active part which
Thomas Hughes had taken in the debates secured him a
seat on the Commission, though he felt that single-handed
he could do little for his friends. All possible pressure
was accordingly brought to bear on the Government with
a view to the appointment of a Trade Unionist member ;
but the idea of a working-man Royal Commissioner was
inconsistent with official traditions. The utmost that could
be obtained was that the workmen and the employers
should each suggest a special representative to be added.
For the workmen a wise and extremely fortunate choice
was made in the person of Frederic Harrison, the Junta
obtaining also permission for representative Trade Unionists
to be present during the examination of the witnesses. ^
The actual conduct of the Trade Unionist case was under-
taken by Harrison and Hughes, in consultation with Apple-
garth, whom the Junta deputed to attend the sittings on
their behalf. The ground of defence was chosen with con-
siderable shrewdness. The policy of the Junta and their
aUies was to focus the attention of the Commissioners upon
the great trade friendly societies in contradistinction to the
innumerable Httle local trade clubs of the old type. The
evidence of Applegarth, who was the first witness examined,
did much to dispel the grosser prejudices against the Unions.
The General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of
Carpenters was able to show that his society, then standing
third in financial magnitude in the Trade Union world, far
^ The Junta did not, however, confine its efforts to action before the
Commission. One of the taunts constantly thrown bj' the press at the
Trade Union leaders was that they did not themselves know what they
wanted. Partly as a reply to this, but also as a manifesto to consolidate
the Unionist forces, in the autumn of 1867 a Bill was prepared by Henry
Crompton and laid before the Junta, and after considerable discussion
adopted by them and by a delegate meeting of Trades held at the Bell
Inn. It was introduced into the House of Commons earlj^ in the follow-
ing session, and served as basis of the Trade Union demand at some of
the elections in 1868, notably that of Shefifield when A. J. Mundella first
was candidate.
K2
266 The Junta and their Allies
from fomenting strikes, was mainly occupied in the work
of an insurance company. He was in a position to lay
effective stress on the total absence of secrecy or coercion
in its proceedings. He disclaimed, on behalf of its mem-
bers, all objection to machinery, foreign imports, piecework,
overtime, or the free employment of apprentices. The
fundamental position upon which he entrenched his Trade
Unionism was the maintenance, at all hazards, of the
Standard Rate of Wages and the Standard Hours of Labour,
to be secured by the accumulation of such a fund as would
enable every member of the Union effectually to set a reserve-
price on his labour, William Allan, who came up on the
third day, followed Applegarth's lead, though with some
reservations ; and the evidence of these two officers of what
were primarily national friendly societies made a marked
impression on the Commission,
The employers were not as well served as the men. It
is true that they succeeded, in spite of Applegarth's dis-
claimers, in persuading the Commission that some of the
most powerful Unions strenuously objected to piecework
and sub-contract in any form whatsoever, and in some
instances even to machinery, , In other cases it was proved
that attempts were made to enforce a rigid limitation of
apprentices. Owing to the energy of the Central Associa-
tion of Master Builders, the restrictive policy of the older
Unions in the building trades was brought well to the
front ; and this fact accounts, even to-day, for most of the
current impression of Trade Unionism among the middle
and upper classes. But the employers did not discriminate
in their attack. Almost with one accord they objected to
the whole principle of Trade Unionism. They reiterated
with a curious impenetrability the old argument of the
" individual bargain," and protested against any kind of
industrial organisation on the part of their employees. All
attempts by the men to claim collectively any share in
regulating the conditions of labour were denounced as " un-
warrantable encroachments on their rights as employers."
The Amalgamated Societies 267
The number of apprentices, like indeed the whole administra-
tion of industry, was claimed as of private concern, the
settlement of which " exclusively belongs to the employer
himself ; a matter in which no other party, much less the
operatives, have got anything to do." And they objected
even more to the centrally administered national society
with extensive reserve funds than to the isolated local clubs
whose spasmodic outbursts they could afford to disregard.
But the confusion between the small local bodies with
their narrow policy of outrage and violence, and the amalga-
mated societies with their far-reaching power and accumu-
lated wealth, effective as it had been in alarming the public,
proved disastrous to the employers when their case was sub-
jected to the acute cross-examination of Frederic Harrison.
The masters, by directing their attack mainly on the great
Amalgamated Societies and the newly-formed local Trades
Councils, played, in fact, directly into the hands of the
Junta. It was easy for Allan and Applegarth to show
that the influence of central Executive Councils and the
formation of a public opinion among trade societies tended
to restrain the more aggressive action of men embittered by
a local quarrel. The combination of friendly benefits with
trade objects was destined to be hotly attacked twenty
years later by the more ardent spirits in the Trade Union
world, as leading to inertia and supineness in respect of
wages, hours, and conditions of labour. The evidence
adduced in 1867-8, read in the hght of later events, reveals
that this tendency had already begun ; and it was im-
possible for the Commissioners to resist the conclusion that
they had, in the Amalgamated Engineers and Carpenters,
types of a far less aggressive Trade Unionism than such
survivals as the purely trade societies of the brickmakers
or the Sheffield industries.
Foiled in this attempt the employers fell back upon an
indictment of the Amalgamated Unions considered as
friendly societies. The leading actuaries were called to
prove that neither the Amalgamated Engineers nor the
268 The Junta and their Allies
Amalgamated CaqDenters could possibly meet their accumu-
lating liabilities, and that these must, in a few years, in-
e\dtably bring both societies to bankruptcy. The whole of
this evidence is a striking instance of the untrustworthiness
of expert witnesses off their own ground. Neither Finlaison
nor Tucker, who were called as actuaries on behalf of the
employers, ever reahsed that a Trade Union, unlike a
Friendly Society, possesses and constantly exercises an un-
limited power to raise funds by special levies, or by in-
creased contributions, whenever it may seem good to the
majority of the members. But even had the actuarial in-
dictment been completely warranted, it was a mistake in
tactics on the part of the employers. The Commissioners
found themselves shunted into an inquiry, not into the
results of Trade Unionism upon the common weal, but into
the arithmetical soyndness of the financial arrangements
which particular groups of workmen chose to make among
themselves.
Meanwhile the primary business of the Commission, the
investigation into the Sheffield outrages, had been remitted
to special " examiners," whose local inquiry attracted far
less attention than the proceedings of the main body. At
first the investigation elicited little that was new ; but in
June 1867 the country was startled by dramatic confessions
on the part of Broadhead and other members of the grinders'
trade clubs, unravelling a series of savage crimes instigated
by them, and paid for out of Club funds. For a short time
it looked as if all the vague accusations hurled at Trade
Unionism at large were about to be justified ; but the
examiners reported tliat four-fifths of the societies even of
the Sheffield trades were free from outrages, and that these
had been most prevalent from 1839 to 1861, and had since
declined. The only other place in which the Commissioners
thought it necessary to make inquiry into outrages was
Manchester, where the Brickmakers' Union had committed
many crimes, but where no complicity on the part of other
trades was shown. It was made evident to all candid
Lord Brassey 269
students that these criminal acts were not chargeable to
Trade Unionism as a whole. They represented, in fact,
the survival among such rough and isolated trades as the
brickmakers and grinders of the barbarous usages of a
time when working men felt themselves outside the law,
and oppressed by tyranny. ^
The success with which the case of the Trade Unionists
had been presented to the Commission was reflected in a
changed attitude on the part of the governing class, a change
expressly attributed to the " greater knowledge and wider
experience " of Trade Unions which had been gained through
the Royal Commission. " True statesmanship," declared
the Times, " will seek neither to augment nor to reduce
their influence, but, accepting it as a fact, will give it free
scope for legitimate development." ^ Thus the official
report of the Commission, from which the enemies of
Trade Unionism had hoped so much, contained no recom-
mendation which would have made the position of any
single Union worse than it was before. An inconclusive
and somewhat inconsistent document, it argued that trade
combination could be of no real economic advantage to the
workman, but nevertheless recommended the legalisation of
the Unions under certain conditions. Whereas the Act
of 1825 had excepted from the common illegaUty only
combinations in respect of wages or hours of labour, the
^ The Broadhead disclosures created a great stir, and Professor Beesly,
wlio had ventured to point out " that a trades union murder was neither
better nor worse than any other murder," was denounced as an apologist
for crime, and nearly lost his professorship at University College, London,
for his sturdy defence of the principle of Trade Unionism. See his
pamphlet, The Sheffield Outrages and the Meeting at Exeter Hall, iSG-j,
16 pp. ; and that by Richard Congreve, Mr. Broadhead and the Anonymous
Press, 1867, 16 pp.
* Times leader, July 8, 1869. The occasion was the epoch-marking
speech of Mr. (afterwards Lord) Brassey, in which, speaking as the son
of a great contractor, he declared himself on the side of the Trade Unions,
and asserted that, by exercising a beneficial influence on the character of
the workmen, they tended to lower rather than to raise the cost of labour
(Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, July 7, 1869). The speech was after-
wards republished, with some additions, under the title of Trade Unions
and the Cost oj Labour, by T. Brassey, 1870, 64 pp.
270 The Junta and their Allies
Commissioners recommended that no combination should
henceforth be Uable to prosecution for restraint of trade,
except those formed " to do acts which involved breach of
contract," and to refuse to work with any particular person.
But the privilege of registration, carrying with it the power
to obtain legal protection for the society's funds, was to be
conferred only on Unions whose rules were free from certain
restrictive clauses, such as the limitation of apprentices or
of the use of machinery, and the prohibition of piecework
and sub-contract. The employers' influence on the Com-
mission was further shown in a special refusal of the privilege
of registration to societies whose rules authorised the support
of the disputes of other trades.
So far the result of the Commission was purely negative.
No hostile legislation was even suggested. On the other
hand, it was obvious that no Trade Union would accept
" legalisation " on the proposed conditions. But Harrison
and Hughes had not restricted themselves to casting out
all dangerous proposals from the majority report. Their
minority report, which was signed also by the Earl of
Lichfield, exposed in terse paragraphs the futility of the
suggestions made by the majority, and laid doNvn in general
terms the principles upon which all future legislation should
proceed. It advocated the removal of all special legislation
relating to labour contracts, on the principle, first, that no
act should be illegal if committed by a workman unless it
was equally illegal if committed by any other person ; and
secondly, that no act by a combination of men should be
regarded as criminal if it would not have been criminal in
a single person. To this was appended a detailed state-
ment, drafted by Frederic Harrison, in wliich the character
and objects of Trade Unionism, as revealed in the voluminous
evidence taken by the Commission, were explained and de-
fended with consummate skill. What was perhaps of even
greater ser\ice to the Trade Union world was a precise and
detailed exposition of the various amendments required to
bring the law into accordance with the general principles
The Dangers of the Law 271
referred to. We have here a striking instance of the advan-
tage to a Labour Movement of expert professional advice.
The Junta had been demanding the complete legalisation of
their Unions in the same manner as ordinary Friendly
Societies. They had failed to reahse that such a legaHsation
would have exposed the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
to be sued by one of its members who might be excluded
for " blacklegging," or otherwise working contrary to the
interests of the trade. The whole efficacy, from a Trade
Union point of view, of the amalgamation of trade and
friendly benefits would have been destroyed. The bare
legaUsation would have brought the Trades Unions under the
general law, and subjected them to constant and harassing
interference by Courts of Justice. They had grown up
in despite of the law and the lawyers ; which as regards
the spirit of the one and the prejudices of the other were,
and still are, ahen and hostile to the purposes and collective
action of the Trades Societies. The danger of any member
having power to take legal proceedings, to worry them by
litigation and cripple them by legal expenses, or to bring a
society within the scope of the insolvency and bankruptcy
law, became very apparent. The Junta easily reahsed, when^
their advisers explained the position, that mere legahsation /
would place the most formidable weapon in the hands of !
unscrupulous employers. To avoid this difficulty Harrison
proposed the ingenious plan of bringing the Trade Union
imder the Friendly Societies Acts, so far as regards the
protection of its funds against theft or fraud, whilst re-
taining to the full the exceptional legal privilege of being
incapable of being sued or otherwise proceeded against as a
corporate entity. Had a Trade Union official been selected
as the sole representative of the Unions on the Commission,
such detailed and ingenious amendments of the law would
not have been devised and made part of an authoritative
official report. The complete charter of Trade Union liberty,
which Harrison and his friends had elaborated, became for
seven years the political programme of the Trade Unionists.
272 The Junta and their Allies
And it is a part of the curious irony of English party politics
that whilst the formation of this programme, and the
agitation by which it was pressed on successive Parliaments,
were both of them exclusively the work of a group of Radicals
it was, as we shall see, a Conservative Cabinet which eventu-
ally passed it into law.^
The effective though informal leadership of the move-
ment which the Junta had assumed during the sittings of
the Royal Commission had not gone entirely unquestioned.
Those who are interested in the cross-currents of personal
intrigues and jealousies which detract from the force of
popular movements can read in the pages of the Beehive
full accounts of the machinations of George Potter. The
Beehive summoned a Trade Union Conference at St. Martin's
Hall in March 1867, which was attended by over one
hundred delegates from provincial societies. Trades Councils,
and the minor London clubs. ^ The Junta, perhaps rather
unwisely, refused to have anything to do with a meeting
held under Potter's auspices. But many of their provincial
allies came up without any suspicion of the sectional char-
acter of the conference, and found themselves in the
anomalous position" of countenancing what was really an
attempt to seduce the London Trades from their allegiance
' The Sheffield Outrages and the Royal Commission produced a large
crop of literature, most of which is of little value. The Commission
itself presented no fewer than eleven reports, with voluminous evidence
and appendices. The Examiners appointed to investigate the outrages
at Sheffield and Manchester presented separate reports, which were laid
before Parhament. The mass of detailed information about strikes and
other proceedings of Trade Societies contained in these reports has been
the main source of all subsequent writings on the subject. The Trade
Unions of England, by the Comte de Paris, 1869, 246 pp., and The Trade
Unions, by Robert Somers (Edinburgh, 1S76, 232 pp.), are, for instance,
little better than summaries, the former friendly, the latter unfriendly,
of the evidence before the Commission. The chapters relating to Trade
Unionism in W. T. Thornton's work On Labour, 1870, which made so
permanent an impression on the economic world, are entirely based upon
the same testimony. Among other pubhcations may be mentioned Trades
Unions Defended, by W. R. Calleuder (Manchester, 1S70, 16 pp.); and
Measures for Pulling an End to the Abuses of Trades Unions, by Frederic
Hill. 1868, 16 pp.
• Report 0/ the Trades Conference, 1807, 3a pp.
Divided Counsels 273
to the Junta and the London Trades Council. The Confer-
ence sat for four days, and made, owing to Potter's energy, no
little stir. A committee was appointed to conduct the Trade
Union case before the Commission, and ConoUy, the President
of the Operative Stonemasons, was deputed to attend the
sittings. But although special prominence was given by
the Beehive to all the proceedings of this committee, we
have failed to discover with what it actually concerned itself.
An indiscreet speech by ConoUy quickly led to his exclusion
from the sittings of the Commission ; and the management
of the Trade Union case remained in the hands of Applegarth
and the Junta.
Apart, however, from jealousy and personal intrigue,
there was some genuine opposition to the poHcy of the Junta.
The great mass of Trade Unionists were not yet converted
to the necessity of obtaining for their societies a recognised
legal status. There were even many experienced officials,
especially in the provincial organisations of the older type,
who deprecated the action that was being taken by the
London leaders, on the express ground that they objected
to legalisation. " The less working men have to do with
the law in any shape the better," was the constant note of
the old Unionists. This view found abundant expression
at the Congresses convened in 1868 by the Manchester
Trades Council, and in 1869 by that of Birmingham. But
in spite of the absence of the Junta from the Manchester
Congress, their friend, John Kane, of the North of England
Ironworkers' Association, succeeded in inducing the dele-
gates to pass a resolution expressing full confidence in the
pohcy and action of the Conference of Amalgamated Trades.^
And at the Congress of 1869, Odger and Howell, as repre-
sentatives of the Junta, managed to get adopted a series
of resolutions embodying Frederic Harrison's proposals. ^
Meanwhile a change had come over the pohtical situa-
tion. At the outset of the crisis Frederic Harrison had
urged upon the Trade Union world the necessity of turning
^ Beehive, June 13, 1868. " Ibid., August 28, i86g.
274 The Junta and their Allies
to the polling booth for redress, " Nothing," he writes in
January, 1867, " will force the governing classes to re-
cognise [the workmen's] claims and judge them fairly, until
they find them wresting into their own hands real pohtical
power. Unionists who, till now, have been content with
their Unions, and have shrunk from pohtical action, may
see the pass to which this abstinence from political move-
ments has brought them." ^ Within a few months of this
advice the Reform Bill of 1867 had enfranchised the work-
ing man in the boroughs. The Trade Union leaders were not
slow to use the advantage thus given to them. The Junta,
under the convenient cloak of the Conference of Amalga-
mated Trades, issued, in July, 1868, a circular urging upon
Trade Unionists the importance of registering their names
as electors, and of pressing on every candidate the question
in which they were primarily interested. The Trades
Councils throughout the country followed suit ; and we
find the Junta's electoral tactics adopted even by societies
which were traditionally opposed to all political action.
The Central Committee of the Stonemasons, for instance,
strongly urged their members to vote at the ensuing
election only for candidates who would support Trade
Union demands. ^
By the beginning of 1869 Frederic Harrison had drafted
a comprehensive Bill, embodying all the legislative pro-
posals of his minority report. This was introduced by
Mundella and Hughes, and although its provisions were
received with denunciations by the employers,^ it gained
some support among the newly elected members, and was
strongly backed up outside the House. The Liberal Govern-
ment of that day, and nearly all the members of the House
of Connnons, were still covertly hostile to the very principles
' Btihue, January 20, 1S07.
■ Fortnightly Circular, June 1868.
• See, for instance, Some opinions on Trade Uni,>ns and tne ims oj
iS6<p, by Edmund Potter, M.P., 1869. 45 pp.; also the Observations upon
the Law of Combinations and Trades Unions, and upon the Trades Unions
BUI, by a Barrister, i8b9, 04 pp.
Provisional Protection 275
of Trade Unionism, and every attempt was made to burke
the measure.^ But the Junta were determined to make felt
their new political power. From every part of the country
pressure was put upon members of Parliament. A great
demonstration of workmen Was held at Exeter Hall, at
which Mundella and Hughes declared their intention of
forcing the House and the Ministry to vote upon the hated
measure. Finding evasion no longer possible, the Govern-
ment abandoned its attitude of hostility and agreed to a
formal second reading, upon the understanding that the
Cabinet would next year bring in a Bill of its own. A
provisional measure giving temporary protection to Trade
Union funds was accordingly hurried through Parhament
at the end of the session pending the introduction of a
complete Bill.^ The Junta had gained the first victory of
their poUtical campaign.
^ In his Letters to the Working Classes, 1870, Professor Beesly gives a
graphic account of the shuffling of the Government, and advises poUtical
action. The annual report of the General Union of House Painters (the
"Manchester Alliance") for 1871 shows how eagerly the advice was
received : " Away with the cry of no politics in our Unions ; this foolish
neutrality has left us without power or influence." See also, for the
whole episode, Robert Applegarth, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912, pp. 138-170 ;
Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell,
1902, pp. 156-172.
2 32 and 33 Vic. c. 61 (1869). This provisional measure was bitterly
opposed in the House of Lords by Earl Cairns, who argued that its uni-
versal protection of the funds of all Unions alike, without requiring the
abandonment of their objectionable rules, was in direct opposition to the
majority report of the Royal Commission. No such surrender to the
Trade Unions was, in his opinion, necessary, as their funds had, in the
previous year, been incidentally protected by an " Act to amend the law
relating to larceny and embezzlement" (31 and 32 Vic. c. n6), passed
at the instance of Russell Gurney, the Recorder of London. This act
had no reference to Trade Unions as such, but it enabled members of a
co-partnership to be convicted for stealing or embezzling the funds of
their co-partnership. Its possible application to defaulting Trade Union
ofl&cialswas perceived by Messrs. Shaen, Roscoe & Co., who have for three
generations acted as solicitors of the leading Unions. At their instance
a case was submitted to the Attornej^-General of the time (Sir John
Karslake), who. advised that a Trade Union could now prosecute in its
character of a partnership. Criminal proceedings were accordingly taken
by the Operative Bricklayers' Society against a defaulting ofhcer who had
set the Executive at defiance, with the result that the prisoner was, in
December 1868, sentenced to six months' hard labour. This successful
276 The Junta and their Allies
The next session found the Government reluctant to
fulfil its promise in the matter. But the Trade Unionists
were not disposed to let the question sleep, and after much
pressure Henry Bruce (afterwards Lord Aberdare), who was
then Home Secretary, produced, in 1871, a Bill which was
eagerly scanned by the Trade Union world. The Govern-
ment proposed to concede all the points on which it had
been specially pressed by the Junta. No Trade Union,
however wide its objects, was henceforth to be illegal merely
because it was " in restraint of trade." Every Union was
to be entitled to be registered, if its rules were not expressly
in contravention of the criminal law. And, finally, the
registration which gave the Unions complete protection for
their funds was so devised as to leave untouched their
internal organisation and arrangements, and to prevent
their being sued or proceeded against in a court of law.
The employers vehemently attacked the Government
for conceding, as they said, practically all the Trade Union
demands.^ But from the men's point of view this " complete
charter legalising Unions " had a serious drawback. The
Bill, as was complained, " while repealing the Combination
Laws, substituted another penal law against workmen "
as such. A lengthy clause provided that any violent
threat or molestation for the purpose of coercing either
employers or employed should be severely punished. All
the terms of the old Combination Laws, " molest," " ob-
struct," " threaten," " intimidate," and so forth, were used
prosecution was widely advertised throughout the Trade Union world,
and was frequently quoted as showing that no further legislation was
needed. But, as was forcibly pointed out by Frederic Harrison and other
advisers of the Junta, Russell Gurney's Act, though it enabled Trade
Unions to put defaulting officials in prison, gave them no power to recover
the sums due, or to take any civil proceedings whatever, and did not
remove the illegality of any combinations of workmen " in restraint of
trade." See Harrison's article, " The Trades Union Bill," in Fortnightly
Review, July i, i86y, and the lealkt published by the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers, on Russell Gurney's Act, December, 1808. ,
* See, for instance, the report of the Leeds meeting of the Master
Builders' Association to object to the Bill, Beehive, March 11, 1871.
Picketing 277
without any definition or limitation, and picketing, more-
over, was expressly included in molestation or obstruction
by a comprehensive prohibition of " persistently following "
any person, or " watching or besetting " the premises in
which he was, or the approach to such premises. The Act
of 1859, which had expressly legalised peaceful persuasion
to join legal combinations, was repealed.-^ It seemed only
too probable that the Government measure would make it
a criminal offence for two Trade Unionists to stand quietly
in the street opposite the works of an employer against
whom they had struck, in order to communicate peacefully
the fact of the strike to any workmen who might be ignorant
of it.
It does not appear that Bruce's fiercely resented " Third
* A short Act had been passed in 1859 (22 Vic. c. 34) which excluded
from the definition of " molestation " or " obstruction " the mere agree-
ment to obtain an alteration of wages or hours, and also the peaceful
persuasion of others without threat or intimidation to cease or abstain
from work in order to obtain the wages or hours aimed at. The Act
was passed without discussion or comment, probably with reference to
some recent judicial decisions, but its actual origin is not clear. The
Stonemasons' Society refused to have anything to do with it, and re-
ferred sneeringly to its promoters as busybodies. Alexander Macdonald
alluded to it in his speech on the Employers and Workmen Bill on June 28,
1875 (Hansard, vol. 225, pp. 66-7), as having been enacted at the instance
of himself and others in order to permit men to persuade others to join
combinations, and that it had had a most beneficial effect. An obscure
pamphlet, entitled Letters to the Trades Unionists and the Working Classes,
by Charles Sturgeon, 1868, 8 pp., gives the only account of its origin that
we have seen. " Some of the judges had decided that the liberty to
combine was only during the period he was not in the employ of any
master (i.e. while on tramp). So obvious a misreading, under which the
working men were getting imprisoned, while their masters combined at
their pleasure, created numerous petitions for rehef, which lay as usual on
the table ; however, the Executive of the National Association of United
Trades assembled in my rooms in Abingdon Street, and we drew a little
BiU of nine lines in length to explain to the judges how they had failed
to explain the views of the legislator. ... I introduced our friends to
the late Henry Drummond, Thomas Duncombe, and Joseph Hume, two
Radicals and an honest Tory, and, strange to say, they worked well
together when in pursuit of justice. After fighting hard against the
great Liberal Party for four or five years, we passed our little Bill (22
Vic. c. 34), to the great joy of the working classes and chagrin of the
Manchester Radicals." But the decision of the R. v. Druitt and
R. V. Bailey in 1867 showed that it did not serve to protect pickets from
prosecution.
278 The Junta and their Allies
Clause " was intended to effect any alteration in the law.
Its comprehensive prohibition of violence, threats, intimida-
tion, molestation, and obstruction did no more than sum
up and codify the various judicial decisions of past years
under which the Trade Unionists had suffered. But the
law had hitherto been obscure and conflicting ; both the
statutes and the judicial decisions had proceeded largely
from a presumption against the very existence of Trade
Unionism which was now passing away ; and the workmen
and their advisers not unreasonably feared the consequences
of an explicit re-enactment of provisions which practically
made criminal all the usual methods of trade combination.
A recent decision had brought the danger home to the minds
of the Trade Union leaders and their legal friends. In
July 1867 a great strike had broken out among the London
tailors, in which the masters' shops had been carefully
" picketed." ^ Druitt, Shorrocks, and other officers of the
^ Henry Crompton gives the following account of the practice of
picketing :— " Picketing is generally much misunderstood. It occurs in
a strike when war has begun. The struggle, of course, consists in the
employer trying to get fresh men, and the men on strike trying to prevent
this. They naturally do their best to induce all others to join them.
Very often the country is scoured by the employers, and men brought
long distances who never would have come if they had known there was
a strike. Men do not wish to undersell their fellows. A man is posted
as a picket, to give information of the grievances complained of, and to
urge the fresh comers not to defeat the strike that is going on.
" Not only is this justifiable, but it is far better that this should be
legal and practised in full publicity than that it should be illegal and done
secretly, for, if done secretly, then bad practices are sure to arise. No
doubt it is done with a view to coerce the employers, just as the lock-out
is with a view to coerce the employed.
" Picketing has other uses and effects. It enables those on strike to
know whether the employers are getting men, and what probability there
is of the strike being successful, to check any fraudulent claims for strike
pay. Besides this, the pubhcity which the system of picketing gives
does, doubtless, exercise a considerable influence upon men's conduct.
Those on strike naturally regard any one acting contrary to the general
interests of the trade with disfavour, just as an unpatriotic man is con-
demned by those imbued with a higher sense of national duty. Picketing
is justified on tliese grounds by the workmen, but all physical molesta-
tion or intimidation is condemned. The workmen have never urged that
such proceedings should not be repressed by penal law." (See The Labout
Law Commission, by Henry Crompton, adopted and published by thp
Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress.)
The Criminal Law 279
, Union were thereupon indicted, not for- personal violence
or actual molestation, but for the vague crime of conspiracy.
The Judge (Baron, afterwards Lord, Bramwell) held that
pickets, if acting in combination, were guilty of " molesta-
tion " if they gave annoyance only by black looks, or even
by their presence in large numbers, without any acts or
gestures of violence, and that if two or more persons com-
bined to do anything unpleasant and annojdng to another
person they were guilty of a common law offence. The
Tailors' officers and committeemen were found guilty merely
of organising peaceful picketing, and it became evident
that, if the elastic law of conspiracy could thus be brought
to bear on Trade Union disputes, practically every incident
of strike management might become a crime. ^ Nor did
Dmitt's case stand alone. Within the memory of the Junta
men had been sent to prison for the simple act of striking,
or even for a simple agreement to strike.^ Indeed, merely
giving notice of a projected strike, even in the most court-
eous and peaceful manner, had frequentl}^ been held to be
an act of intimidation punishable as a crime. ^ In 1851 the
posting up of placards announcing a strike was held to be
intimidation of the employers.* -The Government Bill, far
from accepting Frederic Harrison's proposed repeal of all
criminal legislation specially applying to workmen, left these
judicial decisions untouched, and, by re-enacting them in
"■ Baron Bramwell's view of the law excited much animadversion even
among lawyers. See Stephen's History of the Criminal Law, vol. iii.
pp. 221-2. R. V. Druitt is reported in lo Cox, 600.
} R. V. Hewitt, 5 Cox, 162 (1851). Compare also the observations
of Mr. Justice Hannam as to the mere act of striking being in itself
sometimes criminal, in Farrer v. Close, 4 L.R.Q.B. 612 (1869).
' R. V. Hewitt, 5 Cox. C.C. 163 (1851).
* See Walsby v. Anley, 30 L.J.M.C. 121 (1861) ; Skinner v. Kitch,
10 Cox, 493 (1867) ; O'Neil v. Kruger, 4 Best and Smith, 389 (1863) ;
Wood V. Bowron, 2 Law Report, Q.B. 21 (r866) ; R. v. Rowlands, 5 Cox,
C.C. 493 {1851).
Compare on the whole subject the Appendix to our Industrial
Democracy, 1897 ; The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements, by
R. S. (afterwards Mr. Justice) V^^right (1873); Sir William Erie's Law
Relating to Trade Unions (1873) ; and Stephen's History of the Criminal
Law, vol. iii. chap. xxx.
28o The Junta and their Allies
a codified form, proposed even to make their operation more .
uniform and effectual.
There was, accordingly, some ground for the assertion
of the Trade Unionists that the Government was with-
drawing with one hand what it was giving with the other.
It seemed of little use to declare the existence of trade
societies to be legal if the criminal law was so stretched as
to include the ordinary peaceful methods by which these
societies attained their ends. Above all, the Trade Union-
ists angrily resented tlie idea that any act should be made
criminal if done by them, or in furtherance of their Unions,
that was not equally a crime if committed by any other
person, or in pursuance- of the objects of any other kind
of association.
A storm of indignation arose in the Trade Union world.
The Junta sat in anxious consultation with their legal
advisers, who all counselled the utmost resistance to this
most dangerous re-enactment of the law. A delegate
meeting of the London trades was summoned to protest
against the criminal clauses of Bruce's Bill. But it was
necessary to attack the House of Commons from a wider
area than the Metropohs. With this view the Junta deter-
mined to follow the example set by the Manchester and
Birmingham Trades Councils in 1868 and 1869 by calUng
together a national Trade Union Congress.^
^ Whilst the constant meetings of the Junta, the informal cabinet of
the movement, grew out of the great Amalgamated Societies, the Trades
Union Congress, or " Parliament of Labour," took its rise in the Trades
Councils. We liave already described the special Conference held in
London in 1864, on the Master and Servant Law, which was convened by
the Glasgow Trades Council, and its successor, summoned by the Sheffield
Trades Council in 1867 to concert measures of defence against lock-outs.
But the credit of initiating the idea of an Annual Conference to deal with
all subjects of interest to the Trade Union world belongs to the Manchester
and Salfurd Trades Council, who issued in April 1868 a circular (for-
tunately preserved in the Ironworkers' Journal for May 1868, and printed
at the end of this volume) convening a Congress to be held in Manchester
during Wliit-week, 1868. This Congress was attended by thirty-four
delegates, who claimed to represent about 118,000 Trade Unionists. The
place of meeting of the next Congress was fixed at Birmingham, and the
delegates were in due course convened by the Birmingham Trades Council.
The Trades Union Congress 281
The meeting of the Congress was fixed for March 1871,
by which time it was rightly calculated that the obnoxious
Bill would be actually under discussion in the House of
Commons. The delegates spent most of their time in
denouncing the criminal clauses of the Bill, and came
very near to opposing the whole measure. But it was
ultimately agreed to accept the legahsing part of the Bill,
whilst using every effort to throw out the Third Section.
A deputation was sent to the Home Secretary. Protest
after protest was despatched to the legislators, and the
Congress adjourned at half-past four each day, in order,
as it was expressly declared, that delegates might " devote
the evening to waiting upon Members of Parhament."
But neither the Governm.ent nor the House of Commons
was disposed to show any favour to Trade Union action
in restraint of that " free competition " and individual
bargaining which had so long been the creed of the employers.
The utmost concession that could be obtained was that the
This second Congress, which met in August 1869, included forty-eight
delegates from forty separate societies, having, it was said, 250,000 mem-
bers. But although these general congresses were attended by some of
the most prominent of the provincial Trade Unionists, they were rather
frowned on by the London Junta. The thirty-four delegates at the Man-
chester Congress included indeed hardly any Metropolitan delegates other
than George Potter. Half a dozen representatives from London societies
went to the Birmingham Congress, including Odger and George Howell,
but when a ParUamentary Committee was appointed Odger refused to
serve upon it, regarding it apparently as an unnecessary rival of the
Conference of Amalgamated Trades. The next Congress was appointed
for London in 1870, but the London leaders took no steps to convene it,
until it became -necessary, as we have seen, to call up all forces to oppose
the projected legislation of 1871. The London Congress of March 1871
was, in fact, the first in which the real leaders of the movement took
part, and the ParUamentary Committee which it appointed, acting at
first in conjunction with Applegarth's Conference, naturally took the
place of this on its dissolution. The 1872 Congress at Nottingham was
attended bj- seventy-seven delegates, representing 375,000 members.
Reports of the earhest four congresses must be sought in the Beehive and
(as regards those of Manchester, Birmingham, and Xottingham) in the
contemporary local newspapers. From 1873 onward the Congress has
issued an authorised report of its proceedings. A useful chronological
record has now been pubhshed by W. J. Davis, entitled A History of the
British Trades Union Congress, vol. i. 1910; vol. ii. 1916.
282 The Junta and their Allies
!6ill should be divided into two, so that the law legalising
the existence of trade societies might stand by itself, whilst
the criminal clauses restraining their action were embodied
in a separate " Criminal Law Amendment Bill." This illu-
sory concession sufticed to detach from the opposition many
of those who had at the General Election professed friend-
ship to the Unions. In the main debate Thomas Hughes
and A. J. Mundella stood almost alone in pressing the Trade
Unionists' full demands ; and though a few other members
were inchned to help to some extent, the Second reading
was agreed to without a division. The other stages were
rapidly run through without serious opposition. In the
House of Lords the provisions against picketing were made
even more stringent, " watching and besetting " by a single
individual being made as criminal as " watching and
besetting " by a multitude. In this unsatisfactory shape
the two Bills passed into law.^ Trade Societies became,
for the first time, legally recognised and fully protected
associations ; , whilst, on the other hand, the legislative
prohibition of Trade Union action was expressly reaffirmed,
and even increased in stringency.
In the eyes of the Trade Unions this result amounted
to a defeat ; and the conduct of the Government caused
the bitterest resentment. ^ The Secretaries of the Amal-
gamated Societies, especially Allan and.Applegarth, had,
indeed, attained the object which they personally had most
at heart. The great organisations for mutual succour,
which had been built up by their patient sagacity, were
now, for the first time, assured of complete legal protection.
A number of the larger societies promptly availed them-
selves of the Trade Union Act, by registering their rules
in accordance with its provisions ; ^ and in September
^ 34 and 35 Vic. c. 31 (Trade Uniou Act), and 34 and 35 Vic. c. 32
(Criminal Law Amendment Act).
* See, for instance, the article by Henry Crompton in the Beehive,
September 2, 1871.
' The Operative Bricklayers' Society (London), of which Coulson was
general secretary, stands No. i on the Register.
The Criminal Law Amendment Act 283
1871 the Conference of Amalgamated Trades " having,"
as its final minutes declared, " discharged the duties for
which it was organised," formally dissolved itself.
The \\'ider issue which remained to be fought required
a more representative organisation. In struggling for legal
recognition the Junta had, as we have seen, represented
the more enlightened of the Trade Unionists rather than
the whole movement. But, by the Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act, the Government had deliberately struck a blow
against the methods of all trade societies at all periods.
The growing strength of the organisations of the coal-
miners and cotton-spinners, and the rapid expansion of
Trade Unionism which marked this period of commercial
prosperity, had for some time been tending towards the
development of the informal meetings of the Junta into
a more representative executive. The dissolution of the
Conference of Amalgamated Trades left the field open ; and
the leadership of the Trade Union Movement was assumed
by the Parliamentary Committee which had been appointed
at the Trades Union Congress in the previous March, and
which included all the principal leaders of the chief
metropohtan and provincial societies of the time.
The agitation which was immediately begun to secure
the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act became
during the next four years the most significant feature of
the Trade Union world. Throughout all the various struggles
of these years the Trade Union leaders kept steadily in
view the definite aim of getting rid of a law which they
regarded, not only as hampering their efforts for better
conditions of employment, but also as an indignity and an
insult to the hundreds of thousands of intelHgent artisans
whom they represented. The whole history of this agitation
proves how completely the governing classes were out of
touch with the recently enfranchised artisans. The legis-
lation of 1871 was regarded by the Government and the
House of Commons as the full and final solution of a
long-standing problem. " The judges, however, declared,"
284 The Junta and their Allies
as Henry Crompton points out, " that the only effect of the
legislation of 1871 was to make the trade object of the strike
not illegal. A strike was perfectly legal ; but if the means
employed were calculated to coerce the employer they were
illegal means, and a combination to do a legal act by illegal
means was a criminal conspiracy. In other words, a strike
was lawful, but anything done in pursuance of a strike was
criminal. Thus the judges tore up the remedial statute,
and each fresh decision went further and developed new
dangers." ^ But Gladstone's Cabinet steadfastly refused,
right down to its fall in 1874, even to consider the
possibiUty of altering the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
It was in vain that deputation after deputation pointed out
that men were being sent to prison under this law for such
acts as peacefully accosting a workman in the street. In
1871 seven women were imprisoned in South Wales merely
for saying " Bah " to one blackleg. Innumerable convic-
tions took place for the use of bad language. Almost any
action taken by Trade Unionists to induce a man not to
accept employment at a struck shop resulted, under the
new Act, in imprisonment with hard labour. The intoler-
able injustice of this state of things was made more glaring
by the freedom allowed to the employers to make aU possible
use of " black-lists " and " character notes," by which
obnoxious men were prevented from getting work. No
prosecution ever took place for this form of molestation or
obstruction. No employer was ever placed in the ■ dock
under the law which professedly applied to both parties.
In short, boycotting by the employers was freely permitted ;
boycotting by the men was put down by the police.
The irritation caused by these petty prosecutions was,
in December 1872, deepened into anger by the sentence
of twelve months' imprisonment passed upon the London
gas-stokers. These men were found guilty of "conspiracy"
' Digest of the Labour Laws, signed by F. Harrison and H. Crompton,
and issued by the Trades Union Congress Parliamentary Committees,
September 1S75.
Trade Union Agitation 285
to coerce or molest their employers by merely preparing
for a simultaneous withdrawal of their labour. The vin-
dictive sentence inflicted by Lord Justice Brett was justified
by the governing classes on the ground of the danger to the
community which a strike of gas-stokers might involve ;
and the Home Secretary refused to listen to any appeal on
behalf of the men.^ The Trade Union leaders did not fail
to perceive that no legal distinction could, under the law
as it then stood, be drawn between a gas-stoker and an}'
other workmen. If preparing for a strike was punishable,
under " the elastic and inexplicable law of conspiracy," by
twelve months' imprisonment, it was obvious that the
whole fabric of Trade Unionism might be overthrown by
any band of employers who chose to put the law in force.
The London Trades Council accordingly summoned a dele-
gate meeting " to consider the critical legal position of all
trade societies and their officers consequent upon the recent
conviction of the London gas -stokers." Representation
after representation was made to the Government and to
members of Parliament ; and the movement for the repeal
of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 187 1 was widened
into a determined attempt to get rid of all penal legislation
bearing on trade disputes. ^
Rarely has poHtical agitation been begun i^ such appar-
ently unpromising circumstances, and carried so rapidly
to a triumphant issue. The Liberal administration of
these years, Uke the majority of both parties in the House
of Commons, was entirely dominated by the antagon-
ism felt by the manufacturers to any effective collective
bargaining on the part of the men. The representations
of the Parliamentary Committee found no sympathy either
with Henry Bruce or with Robert Lowe, who succeeded
him as Home Secretary. Gladstone, as Prime Minister,
^ They were, however, eventually released after a few months' im-
prisonment ; see Henry Broadhnrst, the Story of His Life, by himself, 1901,
pp. 59-64; Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, by
G. Howell, T902, pp. 237-53.
- See letter to Beehive, January 11, 1873,
286 The Junta and their Allies
refused in 1872 to admit that there was any necessity for
further legislation, and utterly declined to take the matter
up ; ^ and during that session the Parliamentary Committee
were unable to find any member willing to introduce a Bill
for the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
The Trade Union leaders, however, did not relax their
efforts. Allan, Guile, Odger, and Howell were strongly
reinforced by the representatives of the miners, cotton-
spinners, and ironworkers. Alexander Macdonald and John
Kane, themselves men of remarkable ability, had behind
them thousands of sturdy pohticians in all the industrial
centres. The agitation was fanned by the pubUcation of
details of the prosecutions under the new Act. Effective
Tracts for Trade Unionists were written by Henry Crompton
and Frederic Harrison Congresses at Nottingham in 1872,
at Leeds in 1873, at Sheffield in 1874 kept up the fire,
and passed judgment on those members of Parhament who
treated the Parliamentary Committee with contumely. As
the time of the General Election drew near, the pressure
on the two great pohtical parties was increased. Lists
of questions to candidates were prepared embod3dng the
legislative claims of labour ; and it was made clear that
no candidate would receive Trade Union support unless his
answers were satisfactory.
It will be a question for the historian of English politics
whether the unexpected rout of the Liberal party at the
election of 1874 was not due more to the active hostility
of the Trade Unionists than to the sullen abstention of the
Nonconformists. The time happened to be a high-water
mark of Trade Unionism. In these years of good trade
every society had been rapidly increasing its membership.
The miners, the agricultural labourers, and the textile
operatives in particular had swarmed into organisation in
a manner which recalls the rush of 1834. The Trades
ITnion Congress at Sheffield, held just before the General
Election of 1874, claimed to represent over 1,100,000
' Hansard, vol. 21a, p. 113::, July 15, 1872.
Political Action 287
organised workmen, including a quarter of a million of coal-
miners, as many cotton operatives, and a hundred thousand
agricultural labourers. The proceedings of this Congress
reveal the feeling of bitter anger which had been created
by the obtuseness to the claims of labour of the Liberal
leaders of that day. Not content with turning a deaf ear
to all the representatives of the workmen, they had, with
blundering ignorance, retained as Secretary of the Liberal
Association of the City of London the Sidney Smith who
had, since 1851, been the principal officer of the various
associations of employers in the engineering and iron trades.^
As such he had proved himself a bitter and implacable enemy
of Trade Unionism. We may imagine what would be the
result to-day if either pohtical party were to face a General
Election with Mr. Laws, the organiser of the Shipping
Federation, as its chief of the staff. And whilst the Liberal
party was treating the new electorate with contumely,
the Conservative candidates were hstening blandly to the
workmen's claims, and pledging themselves to repeal the
obnoxious law.
Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the
old idea of Trade Union abstention from poKtics gave way
to a determined attempt at organised pohtical action.
Nor were the Trade Unionists content with merely pressing
the organised pohtical parties in the House of Commons,
The running of independent Labour candidates against
both parties ahke was a most significant symptom of the
new feeling in Labour pohtics. The Labour Representation
League, composed mainly of prominent Trade Unionists,
had for some years been endeavouring to secure the election
of working men to the House of Commons ; and the
independent candidatures of George Odger during 1869 and
1870 had provoked considerable feeling. ^ At a bye-election
^ This formed the subject of bitter comment in the Beehive, January
1874, just before the General Election.
2 The following letter, addressed to Odger by John Stuart Mill, will be
of interest in connection with the perennial question of the expediency of
288 The Junta and their Allies
at Greenwich in 1873, , a third candidate was run with
working-class support against both the great parties, with
the result that Boord, the Conservative, gained the seat. In
what spirit this was regarded by the organised workmen
and their trusted advisers may be judged from the following
leading article which Professor E. S. Beesly wrote for the
Beehive, then at the height of its influence : " The result
of the Greenwich election is highly satisfactory. . . . The
workman has at length come to the conclusion that the
difference between Liberal and Tory is pretty much that
between upper and nether millstone. The quahty of the
two is essentially the same. They are sections of the wealth-
possessing class, and on all ParUamentary questions affecting
the interests of labour they play into one another's hands so
systematically and imperturbably that one would suppose
they thought workmen never read a newspaper or hear
a speech. . . . The last hours of the Session were marked
by the failure of two Bills about which workmen cared
infinitely more than about all the measures put together
for which Mr. Gladstone takes credit since his accession
to ofhce — I mean Mr. Harcourt's Conspiracy Bill and Mr.
Mundella's Nine Hours Bill. As for Mr. Mundella's Bill for
repealing the Criminal Law Amendment Act, it has never
"independent" candidatures. It will be found in the Beehive for Fih-
ruary 13. 1875 :—
" Avignon, February 19, 1871.
" Dear Mr. Odger, — Although you have not been successful, I con-
gratulate you on the result of the polling in Southwark, as it proves th;it
you have the majority of the Liberal party with you, and that you have
called out an increased amount of political feeling in the borough. It is
plain that the Whigs intend to monopolise political power as long as they
can without coalescing in any degree with the Radicals. The working men
are quite right in allowing Tories to get into the House to defeat this
exclusive feehng of the Whigs, and may do it without sacrificing any prin-
ciple. The working men's policy is to insist upon their own representation,
and in default of success to permit Tories to be sent into the House until the
Whin majority is seriously threatened, when, of course, the Whigs will be
happy to compromise, and allow a few working men representatives in the
House. John Stuart Mill."
''Splitting the Vote" 289
had a chance. For the failure of all these Bills the Ministry
must be held responsible. . . .
" This being the case, it is simply silly for Liberal
newspapers to mourn over the Greenwich Election as an
unfortunate mistake. . . . There was no mistake at all at
Greenwich. There was a ' third party ' in the field knowing
perfectly well what it wanted, and regarding Mr. Boord
and Mr. Angerstein with impartial hostihty. I trust that
such a third party will appear in every large town in England
at the next General Election, even though the result should
be a Parhament of six hundred and fifty Boords. Every-
thing must have a beginning, and workmen have waited so
long for justice that seven years of Tory government will
seem a trifling addition to the sum total of their endurance
if it is a necessary prehminary to an enforcement of their
claims." ^
The movement for direct electoral action remained
without official support from Trade Unions as such until
at the 1874 Congress Broadhurst was able to report that
the miners, ironworkers, and some other societies had
actually voted money for Parhamentary candidatures. At
the General Election which ensued no fewer than thirteen
" Labour candidates " went to the poU. In most cases
both Liberal and Conservative candidates were run against
them, with the result that the Conservatives gained the
seats. 2 But at Stafford and Morpeth the official Liberals
accepted what they were powerless to prevent ; and
Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt, the two leading
^ Beehive, August 9, 1873 ; see also that of August 30.
* Halliday, the Secretary of the Amalgamated Association of Miners
offered himself as Labour candidate for Merthyr Tydvil. A fortnight
before the polling day he was indicted at Burnley for conspiracy in connec-
tion with a local miners' strike, but nevertheless went to the poll, receiving
the large total of 4912 votes [Beehive, January 31, 1874). Among the
other " third candidates " were Broadhurst (Wycombe), Howell (Ayles-
bury), Cremer (Warwick), Lucraft (Finsbury), Potter (Peterborough),
Bradlaugh (Northampton), Kane (Middlesborough), Odger (Southwark),
Mottershead (Preston), and Walton (Stoke). See History of Labour Repre-
sentation, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912.
L
290 The Junta mid their Allies
officials of tlie National Union of Miners, became the first
" Labour members " of the House of Commons.
It is significant of the electioneering attitude of the
Conservative leaders that, with the advent of the new
Conservative Government, the Trade Unionists appear to
have assumed that the Criminal Law Amendment Act would
be instantly repealed. Great was the disappointment when it
was announced that a Royal Commission was to be appointed
to inquire into the operation of the whole of the so-called
" Labour Laws." This was regarded as nothing more than
a device for shelving the question, and the Trade Union
leaders refused either to become members of the Commission
or to give evidence before it. Thomas Burt absolutely re-
fused a seat on the Commission. It needed the most specific
assurances by the Home Secretary that the Government
really intended the earliest possible legislation to induce
any working man to have anything to do with the Com-
mission. Ultimately Alexander Macdonald, M.P., allowed
himself to be persuaded to serve, together with Tom Hughes ;
and George Shipton, the Secretary of the London Trades
Council, Andrew Boa, the Secretary of the Glasgow Trades
Council, and a prominent Birmingham Trade Unionist
gave evidence. The investigation of the Commission was
perfunctory, and the report inconclusive. But Ihe Go\'ern-
ment were too fully ahve to the new-found political power
of the Unions to attempt to play \vith the question. At
the beginning of 1875 the imprisonment of five cabinet-
makers employed at Messrs. Jackson & Graham, a well-
known London firm, roused considerable public feeUng.
and led to many questions in Parliament.^ In June the
Home Secretary, in an appreciative and conciliatory speech,
introduced two Bills for altering respectively the civil and
criminal law. As amended in Committee by the efforts
of Mundella and others, these measures resulted in Acts
which completely satisfied the Trade Union demands. The
^ See House of Commons Returns, No. 237 of the 2nd, and No. 273
of the 23rd of June 1875.
The Employers and Workmen Act 291
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871 was formally and
unconditionally repealed. By the Conspiracy and Protection
of Property Act (38 and 39 Vic. c. 86), definite and reasonable
limits were set to the application of the law of conspiracy
to trade disputes. The Master and Servant Act of 1867
was replaced by an Employers and Workmen Act (38 and
39 Vic. c. 90), a change of nomenclature which expressed
a fundamental revolution in the law. Henceforth master
and servant became, as employer and employee, two equal
parties to a civil contract. Imprisonment for breach of
engagement was abolished. The legalisation of Trade
Unions was completed by the legal recognition of their
methods. Peaceful picketing was expressly permitted. The
old words " coerce " and " molest," which had, in the hands
of prejudiced magistrates, proved such instruments of op-
pression, were omitted from the new law, and \dolence and
intimidation were dealt with as part of the general criminal
code. No act committed by a group of workmen was hence-
forth to be punishable unless the same act by an individual
was itself a criminal offence. Collective bargaining, in short,
with all its necessary accompaniments, was, after fifty years of
legislative struggle, finally recognised by the law of the land.^
1 It is not surprising that this sweeping Parliamentary triumph evoked
great enthusiasm in the Trade Union ranks. At the Trade Union Congress
in October 1875, such ardent Radicals as Odger, Guile, and George Howell
joined in the warmest eulogies of J. K. (afterwards Viscount) Cross, whose
sympathetic attitude had surpassed their utmost hopes. " The best
friends they had in Parliament," said Howell, " with one or two exceptions,
never declared for the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. He,
with some friends, v/as under the gallery of the House of Commons when
the measure was under discussion, and they could scarcely believe their
ears when they heard Mr. Cross declare for the total repeal of the Act."
And Odger paid testimony to the " immense singleness of purpose " with
which the Home Secretary " had attended to every proposition that had
been placed before him," and accorded them " the greatest boon ever
given to the sons of toil." An amendment deprecating such " fulsome
recognition of the action of the Conservative party " received only four
votes (Report of Glasgow Congress, 1875). Some minor amendments of
the law relating to the registration and friendly benefits of Trade Unions
were embodied in the Trade Union Act Amendment Act of 1876 (39 and 40
Vic. c. 22). See the Handybook of the Labour Laws, by George Howell,
1876, and his Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders,
r9q2, pp. 156-72.
292 The Junta and their Allies
The paramount importance of the legal and Parlia-
mentary struggle from 1867 to 1875 has compelled us to
relegate to the next chapter all mention of striking con-
temporary events in Trade Union history. The sustained
efforts of this decade, too often ignored by a younger genera-
tion of Trade Unionists, are even now referred to by the
survivors as constituting the finest period of Trade Union
activity. For over eight years the Unions had been sub-
jected to the strain of a prolonged and acute crisis, during
which their very»existence was at stake. Out of this crisis
they emerged, as we have seen, triumphantly successful,
" liberated," to use George Howell's words, " from the last
vestige of the criminal laws specially appertaining to
labour."'^
This tangible victory was not the only result of the
struggle. In order to gain their immediate end the Trade
Union leaders had adopted the arguments of their opponents,
and had been led to take up a position which, whilst it
departed from the Trade Union traditions of the past, proved
in the future a serious impediment to their further theoretic
progress. To understand the intellectual attitude of the
Junta and their friends, we must consider in some detail the
position which they had to attack. From the very beginning
of the century the employers had persistently asserted their
right to make any kind of bargain with the individual
workman, irrespective of its effect on the Standard of Life.
They had, accordingly, adopted the principle, as against
both the Trade Unionists and the Factory Act philanthrop-
ists, of perfect freedom of contract and complete competi-
tion between both workers and employers. In order to
secure absolute freedom of competition between individuals
it was necessary to penalise any attempt on the part of the
workmen to regulate, by combination, the conditions of the
bargain. But this involved, in reality, a departure from
the principle of legal freedom of contract. One form of
contract, that of the collective bargain, was, in effect, made
^ Speech at Trades Union Congress, Glasgow, October 1875.
John Bright 293
a criminal offence, on the plea that, however beneficial it
might seem to the workmen, it cut at the root of national
prosperity. It will be obvious that in urging this conten-
tion the employers were taking up an inconsistent position.
Their pecuniary interest in complete competition outweighed,
in fact, their faith in freedom of contract.
Meanwhile the astute workmen who led the movement
were gradually concentrating their forces upon tite- -only
position from which they could hope to be victorious.
They had, it must be remembered, no means of imposing
their own view upon the community. Even after 1867
their followers formed but a small minority of the electorate,
whilst the whole machinery of pohtics was in the hands of
the middle class. Powerless to coerce or eyen to intimidate
the governing classes, they could win only by persuasion.
It was, however, hopeless to dream of converting the middle
class to the essential principle of Trade Unionism, the com-
pulsory maintenance of the Standard of Life. In the then
state of Pohtical Economy the Trade Unionists saw against
them, on this point, the whole mass of educated opinion in
the country. John Bright, for instance, did but express the
common view of the progressive party of that time when he
solemnly assured the working man that " combinations, in
the long run, must be as injurious to himself as to the
employer against whom he is contending." ^ Lord Shaftes-
bury, the Hfelong advocate of factory legislation, was
praying that " the working people may be emancipated
from the tightest thraldom they have ever yet endured.
AH the single despots, and all the aristocracies that ever
were or ever will be, are as puffs of wind compared with
these tornadoes, the Trade Unions." ^ The Sheffield and
other outrages, the rumours of constant persecution of
non-Unionists, the hand- workers' perpetual objection to
^ In his letter to a Blackburn mill-owner, November 3, i860. Public
Letters of John Bright, collected and edited by H. J. Leech, 1885, p. 80.
^ Letter to Colonel Maude, quoted by Professor Beesly in his address
to the London Trades Council, 1869, reported in Bricklayers' Circtdar,
March 1870.
294 The Junta and their Allies
machinery, the restrictions on piecework and apprentice-
ship— all these real and fancied crimes had created a
mass of prejudice against which it was hopeless for the
Trade Unionists to struggle.
The Union leaders, therefore, wisely left this part of
their case in the background. They avoided arguing
whether Trade Unionism was, in principle, useful or detri-
mental, right or wrong. They insisted only on the right
of every Englishman to bargain for the sale of his labour
in the manner he thought most conducive to his own
interests. What they demanded was perfect freedom for a
workman to substitute collective for individual bargaining,
if he imagined such a course to be for his own advantage.
Freedom of association in matters of contract became,
therefore, their rejoinder to the employers' cry of freedom
of competition.
It is clear that the Trade Unionists had the best of the
argument. It was manifestly unreasonable for the em-
ployers to insist on the principle of non-interference of the
State in industry whenever they were pushed by the advo-
cates of factory legislation, and at the same time to clamour
for the assistance of the police to put down peaceful and
voluntary combinations of their workmen. The capitalists
were, in short, committed to the principle of laissez-faire in
every phase of industrial life, from " Free Trade in Corn " to
the unlimited use of labour of either sex at any age and
under any conditions ; and what the workmen demanded
was only the application of this principle to the wage con-
tract. " The Trade Union question," writes, in 1869, their
chosen representative and most powerful advocate, " is
another and the latest example of the truth, that the sphere
of legislation is strictly and curiously limited. After legis-
lating about labour for centuries, each change producing
its own evils, we have slowly come to see the truth, that we
must cease to legislate for it at all. The public mind has
been of late conscious of serious embarrassment, and eagerly
expecting some legislative solution, some heaven-born dis-
The Trade Union Case 295
coverer to arise, with a new Parliamentary nostrum. As
usual in such cases, it now turns out that there is no legis-
lative solution at all ; and that the true solution requires,
as its condition, the removal of the mischievous meddhng
of the past." ^ This doctrine " that all men may lawfully
agree to work or not to work, to employ or not to employ,
on any terms that they think fit," forms the whole burden
of the speeches and petitions of the Trade Union leaders
throughout this controversy. " We do not," say the official
representatives of Trade Unionism in their memorial to the
Home Secretary in April 1875, " seek to interfere with the
free competition of the individual in the exercise of his craft
in his own way ; but we reserve to ourselves the right
either to work for, or to refuse to work for, an employer
according to the circumstances of the case, just as the
master has the right to discharge a workman, or workmen ;
and we deny that the individual right is in an}^ way inter-
fered with v/hen it is done in concert."
The working men had, in fact, picked up the weapon of
their opponents and left these without defence. But in so
doing the leading Trade Unionists of the time drifted into
a position no less inconsistent than that of the employers.
When they contended that the Union should be as free to
bargain as the individual, they had not the slightest inten-
tion of permitting the individual to bargain freely if they
could prevent him. Though Allan and Applegarth were
able conscientiously to inform the Royal Commission that
the members of their societies did not re:£use to work with
non-society men, they must have been perfectly aware that
this convenient fact was only true in those places and at
those periods in which society men were not in a suffi-
ciently large majority to do otherwise. The trades to which
Henry Broadhurst and George Howell belonged were notori-
ous for the success with which the Unions had maintained
their practice of excluding non-society men from their jobs.
1 Fortnightly Review, July i, 1869. " The Trades Union Bill," by
Frederic Harrison.
296 The Junta and their Allies
The coal-miners of Northumberland and Durham habitually
refused to descend the shaft in company with a non-
Unionist.^
We have shown, in our Industrial Democracy, that this
universal aspiration of Trade Unionism — the enforcement
of membership — stands, in our opinion, on the same foot-
ing as the enforcement of citizenship. But, however this
may be, it is evident that the refusal of the Northumber-
land miners to " ride " with non-society men is, in effect, as
coercive on the dissentient minority as the Mines Regula-
tion Act or an Eight Hours Bill. The insistence upon the
Englishman's right to freedom of contract was, in fact, in
the mouths of staunch Trade Unionists, perilously near cant ;
and we find Frederic Harrison himself, when dealing with
other legislation, warning them that it would be suicidal
for working men to adopt as their own the capitalist cry of
" non-interference." ^ The force of this caution must have
^ William Crawford, the trusted leader of the Durham miners, and a
steadfast opponent of the Eight Hours Bill, in a well-Iaiown letter of later
date (of which we have had a copy), emphatically urges the complete
ostracism of non-society men. " You should at least be consistent. In
numberless cases you refuse to descend and ascend with non-Unionists.
The right or wrong of such action I will not now discuss ; but what is the
actual state of things found in many parts of the country ? While you
refuse to descend and ascend with these men, you walk to and from the pit,
walk in and out bye with them — nay, sometimes work with them. You
mingle with them at home over your glass of beer, in your chapels, and side
by side you pray with them in your prayer meeting. The time has come
when there must be plain speaking on this matter. It is no use playing at
shuttlecock in this important portion of our social life. Either mingle
with these men in the shaft, as you do in every other place, or let them
be ostracised at all times and in every place. Regard them as unfit
companions for yourselves and your sons, and unfit husbands for your
daughters. Let them be branded, as it were, with the curse of Cain, as
unfit to mingle in ordinary, honest, and respectable society. Until you
make up your minds to thus completely and absolutely ostraci.se these
goats of mankind, cease to complain as to any results that may arise
from their action." Compare A Great Labour Leader [Thomas Burt],
by Aaron Watson, 1908.
2 See his letter on the Government Annuities Bill, 1864 : " Lastly, we
are told of Government dictation and interference. I cannot believe men
of sense will say this twice seriousl}'. . . . Leave it to the political econo-
mists to complain. . . . Let working men remember tliat whenever a
measure in their interest is proposed to Parliament, or suggested in the
country — whether it be to limit excessive hours of labour, to protect
Trade Union Inconsistency 297
been evident to the Junta, who had had too much experience
of the workings of modem industry not to realise the need for
a compulsory maintenance of the Standard of Life. No
Trade Unionist can deny that, without some method of
enforcing the decision of the majority, effective trade com-
bination is impossible.
It must not be inferred from the above criticism of the
theoretic position taken by the men who steered the Trade
Union Movement through its great crisis that they were
conscious of their inconsistency with regard to State inter-
vention, or that they deliberately set to work to win their
case upon false premisses. No one can study the history of
their leadership without being impressed by their devotion,
sagacity, and high personal worth. We must regard their
inconsistency as a striking instance of the danger which
besets a party formed without any clear idea of the social
state at which it is aiming. In the struggle of these years
we watch the English Trade Unionists driven from their
Utopian aspirations into an inconsistent opportunism, from
which they drifted during the next generation into the crude
" self-help " of an " aristocracy of labour." During the
whole of this process there was no moment at which the
incompatibihty of their Individuahst and CoUectivist views
was perceived. Applegarth and Odger, for instance, saw no
inconsistency in becoming leading officials of the " Inter-
national " on a programme drafted by Karl Marx, and at
the same time supporting the current Radical demand for
a widespread peasant proprietorship. But it was inevitable
women and children, to regulate unhealthy labour, to provide them with
the means of health, cleanhness, or recreation, to save them from the
exactions of unscrupulous employers — it is universally met with opposi-
tion from one quarter, that of unrestricted competition ; and opposed on
one ground, that of absolute freedom of private enterprise. We all know
— at least, we all explain — how selfish and shallow this cry is in the mouth
of unscrupulous capitalists who resist the Truck System Bill or the Ten
Hours Bill. Is it not suicidal in working men to raise a cry which has
ever been, and still will be, the great resource of those who strive to set
obstacles to their welfare ? The next time working men promote a Short
Time Bill of any kind they will be told to stick to their principle of non-
interference with private capital" (Beehive, March 19, 1864).
L 2
298 The Junta and their Allies
that the exckisive insistence upon the IndiyiduaUst argu-
ments, through which alone the victory of 1875 could be
won, should impress the Individualist ideal upon the minds
of those who stood round the leaders. Other influences,
moreover, promoted the acceptance by the Trade Unionists
of the economic shibboleths of the middle class. The failure
of the crude experiments of Owen and O'Connor, the striking
success of the policy of Free Trade, the growing participa-
tion of working men in the Liberal politics of the time, and,
above all, the close intimacy which many of them enjoyed
with able and fertile thinkers of the middle class, all tended
to create a new school of Trade Unionists. In a subsequent
chapter we shall describe the results of this intellectual
conversion upon the Trade Union Movement. First, how-
ever, we must turn to the internal development of these
years, which our description of the Parliamentary struggles
of 1867-75 has forced us temporarily to ignore. ^
1 From 1861 to 1877 the principal working-class organ was the Bcehht-,
established by a group of Trade Unionists who formed a company in
which over a hundred Unions are said to have taken shares. The editor
and virtual proprietor during its whole life appears to have been George
Potter, who was assisted by a Consulting Committee, on which appeared,
at some time or another, the names of all the leading London Trade
Unionists. Potter, as we have already mentioned, was a man of equivocal
character and conduct, who at no time held any important position in
the Trade Union world, though his London Working Men's Association
made a useful start of the movement for Trade Union representation in
the House of Commons. Under his editorship the Beehive became the
best Labour newspaper which has yet appeared. This was due to the
persistent support of Frederic Harrison. Henry- Crompton, E. S. Boisly,
Lloyd Jones, and other friends of Trade Unionism who, for fifteen years,
contributed innumerable articles, whilst such Trade Union leaders as
Applcgarth, Howell, and Shipton frequently appeared in its columns.
These contributions make it of the greatest possible value to the student
of Trade Union history. Unfortunately, the most complete file in any
public library— that in the British Museum— begins only in i8(>y. Mr.
John Burns possesses a unique set beginning in 1863, which he kindly
placed at our disposal. In 1877 it was converted into the Industtial
Review, which came to an end in 1879.
The place of the Beehive was, in 1881. to some extent taken by the
Labour Standard, a penny weekly established by George Shipton, the
Secretary of the London Trades Council. It ran from May 7, 1881, to
April 29, 1882, and contained articles by Henry Crompton and Professor
E. S. Beesly. together with much Trade Union information.
CHAPTER VI
SECTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
[1863-1885]
From 1851 to 1863 all the effective forces in the Trade Union
Movement were centred in London. Between 1863 and
1867, as we described' in the course of the last chapter,
provincial organisations, such as the Glasgow and Sheffield
Trades Councils, and provincial leaders such as Alexander
Macdonald and John Kane, began to play an important
part in the general movement. The dramatic crisis of 1867,
and the subsequent political struggle, compelled us to break
off our description of the gi'owth of the movement in order
to follow the Parliamentary action of the London leaders.
But whilst the Junta and their alHes were winning their
great victories at Westminster, the centre of gravity of the
Trade Union world was being insensibly shifted from London
to the industrial districts north of the Humber. This was
primarily due to the rapid growth of two great provincial
organisations, the federations of Coal -miners and Cotton
Operatives.
The Miners, now one of the most powerful contingents
of the Trade Union forces, were, until 1863, without any
effective organisation. The Miners' Association of Great
Britain, which, as we have seen, sprang in 1841-43 into a
vigorous existence, collapsed in 1848. An energetic attempt
made by Martin Jude to re-establish a National Association
299
300 Sectional Developments
in 1850, when a conference was held at Newcastle, was, in
consequence of the continued depression in the coal trade,
entirely unsuccessful. For the next few years " the frag-
ments of union that existed got less by degrees and more
minute till, at the close of 1855, it might be said that union
among the miners in the whole country had almost died
out." ^ The revival which took place between 1858 and
1863 was due, in the main, to the persistent work of the
able man who became for fifteen years their trusted leader.
Alexander Macdonald, to whose lifelong devotion the
miners owe their present position in the Trade Union world,
stands, hke William Newton, midway between the casual
and amateur leaders of the old Trade Unionism and the
paid officials of the new type. Himself originally a miner
and the son of a miner, the education and independent
^ Address of Alexander Macdonald to the Leeds Conference, 1873.
Alexander Macdonald, the son of a sailor, who became a miner in Lanark-
shire, was born, at Airdrie in 1821, and went to work in the pit at the
age of eight. Having an ardent desire for education he prepared himself
as best he could for Glasgow University, which he entered in 1846, sup-
porting himself from his savings, and from his work as a miner in the
summer. Whilst still at the University he became known as a leader of
the miners all over Scotland. In 1850 he became a mine manager, and
in 185 1 he opened a school at Airdrie, an occupation which he abandoned
in 1855 to devote his whole time to agitation on behalf of the miners.
On the formation, in 1863, of the National Union of Miners, he was elected
president, a position which he retained until his death. Meanwhile he
was, by a series of successful commercial speculations, acquiring a modest
fortune, which enabled him to devote his whole energies to the promo-
tion of the Parliamentary programme which he had impressed upon the
miners. He gave important evidence before the Select Committee of
1865 on the Master and Servant Law. In 1868 he offered himself as a
candidate for the Kilmarnock Burghs, but retired to avoid a split. At
the General Election of 1874 he was more successful, being returned for
Stafford, and thus becoming (with Thomas Burt) the first " Labour
Member." He was shortly afterwards appointed a member of the Royal
Commission on the Labour Laws, and eventually presented a minority
report of his own on the subject. He died in 1S81. A history of the
coal-miners which he projected was apparently never written, and, with
the exception of numerous presidential addresses and other speeches, and
a pamjihlet entitled Notes and Annotations on the Coal Mines Regulation
Act, 1872 (Glasgow, 1872, 50 pp.), we have found nothing from his pen.
A eulogistic notice of his life by Lloyd Jones appeared in the Newcastle
Chronicle, November 17, 1883, most of which is reprinted in Dr. Baern-
reither's English Associations of Working Men, p. 408.
Alexander Macdonald 301
means whicK he had acquired enabled him, from 1857
onwards, to apply himself continuously to the miners'
cause. A florid style, -and somewhat flashy personaHty,
did him no harm wdth the rough and uneducated workmen
whom he had to marshal. The main source of his effective-
ness lay, however, neither in his oratory nor in his powers
of organisation, but in his exact appreciation of the partic-
ular changes that would remedy the miners' grievances,
and in the tactical skill ^\'ith which he embodied these
changes in legislative form. Like his friends, Allan and
Applegarth, he relied almost exclusively on Parliamentary
agitation as a means for securing his ends. But whilst the
Junta were contenting themselves with securing political
freedom for Trade Unionists, Macdonald from the first
persistently pressed for the legislative regulation of the
conditions of labour. And though, like his London allies,
he consorted largely with the middle-class friends of Trade
Unionism, and freely utiHsed their help in the House of
Commons, he proved his superior originahty and tenacity
of mind by never in the sHghtest degree abandoning the
fundamental principle of Trade Unionism — the compulsory
maintenance of the workman's Standard of Life.
" It was in 1856," said Macdonald on a later occasion,
" that I crossed the Border first to advocate a better Mines
Act, true weighing, the education of the young, the restric-
tion of the age till twelve years, the reduction of the working
hours to eight in every twenty-four, the training of managers,
the payment of wages weekly in the current coin of the realm,
no truck, and many other useful things too numerous to
.mention here. Shortly after that, bone began to come to
bone, and by 1858 we were in full action for better laws." ^
The pit clubs and informal committees that pressed these
demands upon the legislature became centres of local
organisation, with which Macdonald kept up an incessant
correspondence. An arbitrary lock-out of several thousand
men by the South Yorkshire coal-owners in 1858 welded
^ Address to the Miners' National Conference at Leeds, 1873.
302 Sectional Developments
the miners of that coal-field into a compact district asso-
ciation, and enabled Macdonald, in the same year, to get
together a national conference at Ashton-under-Lyne, at
which, however, the delegates could claim to represent only
four thousand men in union. In i860, when the Mines
Regulation Act was being passed into law, Macdonald was
able to score a success- in the " checkweigher " clause, to
which we shall again refer. Not until the end of 1863, how-
ever, can the Miners' National Union be said to have been
effectively established ; and the proceedings of the Leeds
Conference of that year strike the note of the policy which
Macdonald, to the day of his death, never ceased to press
upon the miners, and to which the great majority of them
have now, after a temporary digression, once more returned.
The Miners' Conference at Leeds was. in many respects
a notable gathering. Instead of the formless interchange of
talk which had marked the previous conference, Macdonald
induced the fifty-one delegates who sat from the 9th to the
14th of November 1863 at the People's Co-operative Hall
to organise their meeting on the model of the National Asso-
ciation for the Promotion of Social Science, and divide
themselves into three sections, on Law, on Grievances, and
on Social Organisation, each of which reported to the whole
conference.'^ The proceedings of the day were opened with
prayer by the " Chaplain to the Conference," the Rev.
Joseph Rayner Stephens, celebrated as the opponent of
the New Poor Law and the advocate of factory legislation
and Chartism. 2 In the reports of the sections and the
^ The Conference appointed a sub-committee to compile and publish
its proceedings, "a thing," as the preface explains, "altogether unpar-
alleled in the records of labour." And indeed the elaborate volume,
regularly published by the eminent firm of Longmans in 1864, entitled
Transactions and Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime, and
Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November 9, 10, 11, 12,
13, and 14, iS6j, with its 174 pages, its frontispiece representing the
pit-brow women, and its motto on the title-page extracted from the
writings of W. E. Gladstone, formed a creditable and impressive appeal
to the reading public.
2 For this militant Chartist (1805 jy), see Life of Joseph Rayner
Stephens, by G. J. Holyoake, 1881.
Legal Regulation 303
numerous resolutions of the conference we find all the points
of Macdonald's programme. The paramount importance of
securing the Standard of Life by means of legislative regu-
lation of the conditions of work is embodied in a lengthy
series of proposals which have nearly all since been inserted
in the detailed code of mining law. In contradistinction
to the view which would make wages depend upon prices,
the principle of controlling industry in such a way as to
prevent encroachments on the workman's standard main-
tenance is clearly foreshadowed. " Overtoil," says the
report, " produces over-supply ; low prices and low wages
follow ; bad habits and bad health follow, of course ; and
then diminished production and profits are inevitable. Re-
duction of toil, and consequent improved bodily health,
increases production in the sense of profit ; and limits it
so as to avoid overstocking ; better wages induce better
habits, and economy of working follows. . . . The evil of
overtoil and over-supply upon wages, and upon the labourer,
is therefore a fair subject of complaint ; and, we submit,
as far as these are human by conventional arrangements,
are a fair and proper subject of regulation. Regulations
must, of course, be twofold. Part can be legislated for
by compulsory laws ; but the principle [sic) must be
the subject of voluntary agreement." ^ The restriction of
labour in mines to a maximum of eight hours per day was
strongly urged ; but at Macdonald's instance it was astutely
resolved not to ask for a legal regulation of the hours of
adult men, but to confine the Parliamentary proposal to a
Bill for boys. And it is interesting to observe already at
this time the beginning of the deep cleavage between the
miners of Northumberland and Durham and their fellow-
workers elsewhere. The close connection between the legal
regulation of the hours of boys and the fixing of the men's
day is brought out by William Crawford, the future leader
••■ Transactions and Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime,
and Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, and 14, 1863, p. 14.
304 Sectional Developments
of the Durham men. The general feeUng of the conference
was in favour of a drastic legal prohibition of boys being
kept in the mine for more than eight hours, but Crawford
declared that " an eight hours bill could not be carried out
in his district. He wanted the boys to work ten hours a day,
and the men six hours." ^ He therefore proposed a legal Ten
Hours Day for the boys. The conference, however, declined
to depart from the principle of Eight Hours ; and the Bill
drafted in this sense was eventually adopted without dissent.
Another reform advocated by Macdonald has had far-
reaching though unforeseen effect upon the miners' organisa-
tion. The arbitrary confiscation of the miiiers' pay for
any tubs or hutches which were declared to be improperly
filled had long been a source of extreme irritation. It
had become a regular practice of unscrupulous coal-owners
to condemn a considerable percentage of the men's hutches,
and thus escape payment for part of the coal hewn. The
grievance was aggravated by the absolute dependence of
the miner, working underground, upon the honesty and
accuracy of the agent of the employer on the surface, who
recorded the amount of his work. A demand was accord-
ingly made by the men for permission to have their own
representative at the pit-bank, who should check the weight
to be paid for. During the year 1859 great contests took
place in South Yorkshire, in which, after embittered resist-
ance, the employers in several colUeries conceded this boon.
A determined attempt was then made by the South York-
shire Miners' Union, aided by Macdonald, to insert a clause
in the Mines Regulation Bill, making it compulsory to weigh
the coal, and to allow a representative of the men to check
the weight. A great Parliamentary fight took place on the
men's amendment, with the result that the Act of i860
empowered the miners of each pit to appoint a checkweigher,
but confined their choice to persons actually in employment
^ Transactions atid Results of the National Association of Coal, Lime, and
Ironstone Miners of Great Britain, held at Leeds, November g, lo, it, 12, 13,
and 14, 1863, p. 17. In Northumberland and Durham the hewers very
largely work in two shifts, whilst there used to be only one shift of boys.
The Checkweigher 305
at the particular mine.^ This important victory was long
rendered nugatory by the evasions of the coal-owners. At
Barnsley, for instance, Normansell, appointed checkweigher,
was promptly dismissed from employment and refused
access to the pit's mouth. WTien the employer was fined
for this breach of the law he appealed to the Queen's Bench ;
and it cost the Union two years of costly litigation to
enforce the reinstatement of the men's agent. ^ The next
twenty years are full of attempts by coal-o-WTiers to avoid
compliance with this law. Where the men could not be
persuaded or terrified into forgoing their right to appoint
a checkweigher, every device was used to hamper his work.
Sometimes he was excluded from close access to the weighing-
machine. In other pits the weights were fenced up so that
he could not clearly see them. His calculations were hotly
disputed, and his interference bitterly resented. The
Miners' Unions, however, steadily fought their way to per-
fect independence for the checkweigher. The Mines Regu-
lation Act of 1872 sHghtly strengthened his position. Finally
the x\ct of 1887, confirmed by that of 191 1, made clear the
right of the men, by a decision of the majority of those
^ Section 29 of Mines Regulation Act of i860.
^ Normansell v. Piatt. John Normansell, the agent of the South
Yorkshire Miners' Association, stands second only to ]\Iacdonald as a
leader of the miners between 1863 and 1875. The son of a banksman,
he was born at Torkington, Cheshire, in 1830, and left an orphan at an
early age. At seven he entered the pit, and when, at the age of nine-
teen, he married, he was unable to write his own name. Migrating to
South Yorkshire, he became a leader in the agitation to secure a check-
weigher, which the local coal-owners conceded in 1859. Normansell was
elected to the post for his own pit, and rapidly became the leading spirit
in the district. After the lock-out of 1864 he was elected secretary to
the Union, then counting only two thousand members. Within eight
years he had raised its membership to twenty thousand, and buHt up ar^
elaborate system of friendly benefits. Normansell was the first working-
man Town Councillor, having been triumphantly elected at Barnsley, his
Union subscribing /looo to lodge in the bank in his name, in order to
enable him to declare himself possessed of the pecuniary quaUfication at
that time required. On his death the amount was voted to his widow.
Normansell gave evidence in 1867 before the Select Committee on Coal-
mining, and before that on the Master and Servant Law, in 1868 before
the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, and in 1873 before that on the
Coal Supply.
3o6 Sectional Developments
employed in any pit, to have, at the expense of the whole
pit, a checkweigher with full power to keep an accurate
and independent record of each man's work.
It would be interesting to trace to what extent" the
special characteristics of the miners' organisations are due
to the influence of this one legislative reform. Its recog-
nition and promotion of collective action by the men has
been a direct incitement to combination. The compulsory
levy, upon the whole pit, of the cost of maintaining the
agent whom a bare majority could decide to appoint has
practically found, for each colliery, a branch secretary
free of expense to the Union. But the result upon the
character of the officials has been even more important.
The checkweigher has to be a man of character insensible
to the bullying or blandishments of manager or employers.
He must be of strictly regular habits, accurate and business-
like in mind, and quick at figures. The ranks of the check-
weighers serve thus as an admirable recruiting ground from
which a practically inexhaustible supply of efficient Trade
Union secretaries or labour representatives can be drawn.
The Leeds Conference of 1863 was the first of a series
of yearly or half-yearly gatherings of miners' delegates
which did much to consohdate their organisation. The
powerful aid brought by Macdonald to the movement for
the Master and Servant Act of 1867 has already been de-
scribed. But between 1864 and 1869 the almost uninter-
rupted succession of strikes and lock-outs, in one county or
another, prevented the National Association from takinti: a
firm hold on the men in the less organised districts. In
1869 a rival federation, called the Amalgamated Association
*of Miners, was formed by the men of some Lancashire pits,
to secure more systematic support of local strikes. This
split only increased the number of miners in union, wliich
in a few years reached the unprecedented total of two
hundred thousand.
It is easy to understand how much this army of miners,
marshalled by an expert Parliamentary tactician, added to
I
The Cotton Operatives 307
the political weight of the Trade Union leaders. Though
only partially enfranchised, their influence at the General
Election of 1868 was marked ; and when, in 1871, the
Trades Union Congress appointed a Parliamentary Committee
Macdonald became its chairman. Next year he succeeded
in getting embodied in the new Mines Regulation Act many
of the minor amendments of the law for which he had been
pressing ; and in 1874 he and his colleague, Thomas Burt,
became, as we have seen, the first working-men members of
the House of Commons. ,
Not less important than the somewhat scattered hosts
of the Coal-miners was the compact body of the Lancashire
Cotton Operatives, who, from 1869 onward, began to be
reckoned as an integral part of the Trade Union world.
The Lancashire textile workers, who had, in the early part
of the century, played such a prominent part in the Trade
Union Movement, and whose energetic " Short Time Com-
mittees " had, in 1847, obtained the Ten Hours Act, appear
to have fallen, during the subsequent years, into a state of
disorganisation and disunion. In 1853, it is true, the
present Amalgamated Association of Cotton-spinners was
established ; but this federal Union was weakened, until
1869, by the abstention or lukewarmness of the local
organisations of such important districts as Oldham and
Bolton. The cotton-weavers were in a somewhat similar
condition. The Blackburn Association, established in 1853,
was gradually overshadowed by the North-East Lancashire
Association, a federation of the local weavers' societies in the
smaller towns, established in 1858. This association, growing
out of a secession from the Blackburn organisation, had
for its special object the combined support of a skilled
calculator of prices, able to defend the operatives' interests
in the constant discussions which arose upon the com-
plicated lists of piecework rates which characterise the
English cotton industry. ^
^ The best and indeed the only exact account of these cotton lists is
that prepared for the Economic Section of the British Association by a
3o8 Sectional Developments
It is difficult to convey to the general reader any adequate
idea of the important effect which these elaborate " Lists "
have had upon the Trade Uniofi Movement in Lancashire.
The universal satisfaction with, and even preference for,
the piecework system among the Lancashire cotton opera-
tives is entirely due to the existence of these definitely
fixed and published statements. An even more important
result has been the creation of a peculiar type of Trade
Union official. For although the lists are elaborately worked
out in detail — the Bolton Spinning List, for instance, com-
prising eighty-five pages closely filled with figures ^ — the
intricacy of the calculations is such as to be beyond the com-
prehension not only of the ordinary operative or manufac-
turer, but even of the investigating mathematician without
a very minute knowledge of the technical detail. Yet the
week's earnings of every one of the tens of thousands of
operatives are computed by an exact and often a separate
calculation under these Usts. And when an alteration of
the list is in question, the standard wage of a whole district
may depend upon the quickness and accuracy with which
the operatives' negotiator apprehends the precise effect of
each projected change in any of the numerous factors in the
calculation. It will be obvious that for work of this nature
committee consisting of Professor Sidgwick, Professor Foxwell, A. H. D.
(now Sir Arthur) Acland, Dr. W. Cunningham, and Professor J. E. C.
Munro, the report being drawn up by the latter. {On the Regulation of
Wages by means of Lists in the Cotton Industry, Manchester, 1887 ; in
two parts — Spinning and Weaving.) See History of Wages in the Cotton
Trade during the Past Hundred Years, by G. H. Wood, 1910; A Century
of Fine Coitbn Spinning, by McConnel & Co., 1906; and Standard Piece
Lists and Sliding Scales, by the Labour Department of the Board of
Trade, Cd. 144, 1900.
The principles upon which the lists are framed are so complicated
that we confess, after prolonged study, to be still perplexed on certain
points ; and though Professor Munro clears up many difficulties, we are
disposed to believe that even he, in some particulars, has not in all cases
correctly stated the matter. We have discussed the whole subject in our
Industrial Democracy.
^ Bolton and District Net List of Prices for Spinning Twist, Reeled
Yarn or Bastard Twist, and Weft, on Self-actor Mules (Bolton, 1887;
85pp.).
The Short Time Bill 309
the successful organiser or " born orator " was frequently
quite unfit. There grew up, therefore, both among the
weavers and the spinners, a system of selection of new secre-
taries by competitive examination, which has gradually
been perfected as the examiners — that is, the existing
officials — have themselves become more skilled. The first
secretary to undergo this ordeal was Thomas Birtwistle,^
who in 1861 began his thirty years' honourable and successful
service of the Lancashire Weavers. Within a few years he
was reinforced by other officials selected for the same
characteristics. From 1871 onwards the counsels of the
Trade Union Movement were strengthened by the intro-
duction of " the cotton men," a bod}^ of keen, astute, and
alert-minded officials — a combination, in the Trade Union
world, of the accountant and the lawyer.
Under such guidance the Lancashire cotton operatives
achieved extraordinary success. Their first task was in all
districts to obtain and perfect the lists. The rate and
method of remuneration being in this way secured, their
energy was devoted to improving the other conditions of
their labour by means of appropriate legislation. Ever
since 1830 the Lancashire operatives, especially the spinners,
have strongly supported the legislative regulation of the
hours and other conditions of their industry. In 1867 a
delegate meeting of the Lancashire textile operatives, under
the presidency of the Rev. J. R. Stephens, had resolved
" to agitate for such a measure of legislative restriction as
shaU secure a uniform Eight Hours Bill in factories, exclusive
of meal-times, for adults, females, and young persons, and
that such Eight Hours Bill have for its foundation a restric-
tion on the moving power." ^ On the improvement of trade
^ Birtwistle was, in 1892, at an advanced age, appointed by the Home
Secretary an Inspector in the Factory Department, under the "particu-
lars clause " (sec. 24 of the Factory and Workshops Act, 1891), as the
only person who could be found competent to understand and interpret
the intricacies of the method of remuneration in the weaving trade.
2 Beehive, February 23, 1867. The circular announcing the resolu-
tion is signed by the leading officers of the Cotton-spinners' and Cotton-
weavers' Unions of the time.
310 Sectional Developments
and the revival of Trade Union strength in 1871-72 this policy
was again resorted to. The Oldham spinners tried, indeed,
in 1871, to secure a " Twelve-o'clock Saturday " by means
of a strike. But on the failure of this attempt the dele-
gates of the various local societies, both of spinners and
weavers — usually the officials of the trade — met together
and established, on the 7th of January 1872, the Factory
Acts Reform Association, for the purpose of obtaining
such an amendment of the law as would reduce the hours
of labour from sixty to fifty-four per week.
The Parliamentary policy of these shrewd tacticians is
only another instance of the practical opportunism of the
English Trade Unionist. The cotton officials demurred in
1872 to an overt alliance with the Parliamentary Committee
of the Trades Union Congress, just then engaged in its heated
agitation for a repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
" Some members of the Short Time Committee," states,
without resentment, the Congress report, " thought that even
co-operation with the Congress Committee would be disas-
trous rather than useful, ... as Lord Shaftesbury and
others declared they would not undertake a measure pro-
posed in the interest of the Trades Unions." ^ So far as
the public and the House of Commons were concerned, the
Bill was accordingly, as we are told, " based upon quite
other grounds." Its provisions were ostensibly restricted,
like those of the Ten Hours Act, to women and children ;
and to the support of Trade Union champions such as
Thomas Hughes and A. J. Mundella was added that of such
philanthropists as Lord Shaftesbury and Samuel Morlcy.
But it is scarcely necessary to say that it was not entirely,
or even exclusively, for the sake of the women and childien
that the skilled leaders of the Lancashire cotton operatives
had diverted their " Short Time Movement " from aggressive
strikes to Parliamentary agitation. The private minutes
of the P'actory Acts Reform Association contain no mention
^ Report of llie Parliamentary Committee to the Trades Union Con-
gress, January 1873.
" Behind the Women's Petticoats " 311
of the woes of the women and the children, but reflect
throughout the demand of the adult male spinners for a
shorter day. And in the circular " to the factory opera-
tives/' caUing the original meeting of the association, we
find the spinners' secretary combating the fallacy that
" any legislative interference with male adult labour is an
economic error," and demanding " a legislative enactment
largely curtailing the hours of factory labour," in order
that his constituents, who were exclusively adult males,
might enjoy " the nine hours per day, or fifty-four hours
per week, so hberally conceded to other branches of work-
men." ^ It was, however, neither necessary nor expedient
to take this line in public. The experience of a generation
had taught the Lancashire operatives that any effective
limitation of the factory day for women and children could
not fail to bring with it an equivalent shortening of the
hours of the men who worked with them. And in the
state of mind, in 1872, of the House of Commons, and even
of the workmen in other trades, it would have proved as
impossible as it did in 1847 to secure an avowed restriction
of the hours of male adults.
The Short Time Bill was therefore so drafted as to apply
in express terms only to women and children, whose suffer-
ings under a ten hours day were made much of on the
platform and in the press. The battle, in fact, was, as one
of the leading combatants has declared,^ " fought from
behind the women's petticoats." But it was a part of the
irony of the situation that, as Broadhurst subsequently
pointed out,^ the Bill " encountered great opposition from
1 Circular of December ii, 1871, signed on behalf of the preliminary
meeting by Thomas Mawdsley — not to be mistaken for James Mawdsley,
J. P., a subsequent secretary.
2 Thomas Ashton, J. P. (died 1919), then secretary of the Oldham
Spinners, often made this statement. On the 26th of May 1893 the
Cotton Factory Times, the men's accredited organ, declared, ■with refer-
ence to the Eight Hours Movement, that " now the veil must be lifted,
and the agitation carried on under its true colours. Women and children
must no longer be made the pretext for securing a reduction of working
hours for men."
^ Speech at Trades Union Congress, Bristol, 1878.
312 Sectional Developments
the female organisations " ; and it was, in fact, expressly
in the interests of working women that Professor Fawcett,
in the session of 1873, moved the rejection of the measure.^
Even as limited to women and children the proposal en-
countered a fierce resistance from the factory owners and
the capitalists of all industries. The opinion of the House
of Commons was averse from any further restriction upon
the employers' freedom. The Ministry of the day lent it no
assistance. The Bill, introduced in 1872, and again in
1873, made no progress. At length, in 1873, the Govern-
ment shelved the question by appointing a Royal Commission
to inquire into the working of the Factory Acts. But a
General Election was now drawing near ; and " a Factory
Nine Hours Bill for Women and Children " was incorporated
in the Parliamentary programme pressed upon candidates
by the whole Trade Union world. ^
We have already pointed out what an attentive ear the
' Conservative party was at this time giving to the Trade
Union demands. It is therefore not surprising that when
Mundella, in the new Parhament, once more introduced his
Bill, the Home Secretary, Mr. (afterwards Viscount) Cross,
announced that the Government would bring forward a
measure of their own. The fact that the Government draft
was euphemistically entitled the " Factories (Health of
Women, etc.) Bill " did not conciliate the opponents of the
shorter factory day which it ensured ; but, to the great
satisfaction of the spinners, this opposition was unsuccess-
ful ; and, if not a nine hours day, at any rate a 56A hours
week became law. This short and successful Parliamentary
campaign brought the cotton operatives into closer contact
with the London leaders ; and from 1875 the Lancashire
representatives exercised an important influence in the
Trades Union Congress and its Parliamentary Committee.
^ " From what I have heard," writes Professor Bcesly in the Beehive,
May 16, 1874, " I am inclined to think that no single fact had more to
do with the defeat of the Liberal Party in Lancashire at the last election
than Mr. Fawcett's speech on the Nine Hours Bill in the late Parliament."
2 I^eport of Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, January 1874.
Coal and Cotton 313"
Henceforth detailed amendments of the Factory Acts, and
increased efficiency in their administration, become almost
standing items in the official Trade Union programme.
An interesting paraUeUsm might be traced between the
cotton operatives on the one hand and the coal-miners on
the other. To outward seeming no two occupations could
be more unlike. Yet without community of interest, with-
out official intercourse, and without any traceable imitation,
the organisations of the two trades show striking resem-
blances to each other in history, in structural development,
and in characteristics of pohcy, method, and aims. Many
of these similarities may arise from the remarkable local
aggregation in particular districts, which is common to both
mdustries. From this local aggregation spring, perhaps,
the possibihties of a strong federation existing without
centrahsed funds, and of a permanent trade society en-
during without friendly benefits. A further similarity may
be seen m the creation, in each case, of a special class of
Trade Union officials, far more numerous in proportion to
membership than is usual in the engineering or building
trades. But the most noticeable, and perhaps the most
important, of these resemblances is the constancy with
which both the miners and the cotton operatives have
adhered to the legislative protection of the Standard of
Life as a leading principle of their Trade Unionism.
Wliilst these important divisions of the Trade Union
army were aiming at legislative protection, victories in
another fi^ld were bringing whole sections of Trade Unionists
to a different conclusion. The successful Nine Hours Move-
ment of 1871-72— the reduction, by collective bargaining, of
the hours of labour in the engineering and building trades
— nvalled the legislative triumphs of the miners and the
cotton operatives.
Since the great strikes in the London building trades in
1859-61, the movement in favour of a reduction of the
hours of labour had been dragging on in various parts of
the country. The masons, carpenters, and other building
314 Sectional Developments
operatives had in many towns, and after more or less con-
flict, secured what was termed the Nine Hours Day. In
1866 an agitation arose among the engineers of Tyneside for
a similar concession ; but the sudden depression of trade
put an end to the project. In 1870, when the subject was
discussed at the Newcastle " Central District Committee "
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the spirit of
caution prevailed, and no action was taken. Suddenly, at
the beginning of 1871, the Sunderland men took the matter
up, and came out on strike on the ist of April. After
four weeks' struggle, almost before the engineers elsewhere
had realised that there was any chance of success, the local
employers gave way, and the Nine Hours Day was won.
It was evident that the Sunderland movement was
destined to spread to the other engineering centres in the
neighbourhood ; and the master engineers of the entire
North-Eastern District promptly assembled at Newcastle
on April 8 to concert a united resistance to the men's
demands. The operatives had first to form their organisa-
tion. Though Newcastle has since become one of the
best centres of Trade Unionism, the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers could,' in 1871, count only five or six hundred
members in the town ; the BoileiTnakers, Steam-Engine
Makers, and Ironfounders were also weak, and probably
two out of three of the men in the engineering trade be-
longed to no Union whatsoever. A " Nine Hours League,"
embracing Unionists and non-Unionists ahke, was accord-
ingly formed for the special purpose of the agitation ; and
this body was fortunate enough to elect as its President
John Burnett,! a leading member of the local branch of
1 John Burnett, who was born at Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1842,
became, after the Nine Hours Strike, a lecturer for the National Educa-
tion League, and joined the staff of the Newcastle Chronicle. In 1875, on
Allan's death, he was elected to the General Secretaryship of the Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers. He was a member of the ParHamcntary
Committee of the Trades Union Congress from 1876 to 1885. In 1886
he was appointed to the newly-created post of Labour Correspondent of
the Board of Trade, in wliich capacity he prepared and issued a series
of reports on Trade Unions and Strikes. On the estabhshment of the
The Nine Hours Strike 315
the Amalgamated Society, afterwards to become widely
known as the General Secretary of that great organisation.
The " Nine Hours League " became, in fact though not in
name, a temporary Trade Union, its committee conducting
all the negotiations on the men's behalf, appealing to the
Trade Union world for funds for their support, and managing
all the details of the conflict that ensued.^
The five months' strike which led up to a signal victory
for the men was, in more than one respect, a notable event
in Trade Union annals. The success with which several
thousands of unorganised workmen, unprovided with any
accumulated funds, were marshalled and disciplined, and
the abihty displayed in the whole management of the dis-
pute, made the name of their leader celebrated throughout
the world of labour. The tactical skill and hterary force
with which the men's case was presented achieved the
unprecedented result of securing for their demands the
support of the Times ^ and the Spectator. Money was
Labour Department in 1893 he became Chief Labour Correspondent
under the Commissioner for Labour, and was selected to visit the United
States to prepare a report on the effects of Jewish immigration. He
retired in 1907 and died 1914.
^ A full account of this conflict is given by John Burnett in his History
of the Engineers' Strike in Newcastle and Gateshead (Newcastle, 1872 ;
77 PP-)- -A- description by the Executive of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers is given in their " Abstract Report " up to December 31, 1872.
The Newcastle Daily Chronicle, from April to October 1871, furnishes a
detailed contemporary^ record. The leading articles and correspondence
in the Times oi September 1871 are important.
^ See the Times leader of September 11, 1871. This leader, which
pronounced " the conduct of the employers throughout this dispute as
imprudent and impohtic," called forth the bewildered remonstrance of
Sir William (afterwards Lord) Armstrong, WTiting on behalf of " the
Associated Employers." " We were amazed," writes the great captain
of industry, " to see ourselves described in j-our article as being in a
condition of hopeless difficulty ; and we really felt that, if the League
themselves had possessed the power of inspiring that article, they could
scarcely have used words more calculated to serve their purposes than
those in which it is expressed. The concurrent appearance in the Spectator
of an article exhibiting the same bias adds to our surprise. We had
imagined that a determined effort to wrest concessions from employers
by sheer force of combination was not a thing which found favour with
the more educated and intelhgent classes, whose opinions generally find
expression in the columns of the Times" {Times September 14, 1871).
3i6 Sectional Developments
subscribed slowly at first, but after three months poured
in from all sides. Joseph Cowen, of the Newcastle Daily
Chronicle, was from the first an ardent supporter of the
men, and assisted them in many ways. The employers in
all parts of the kingdom took alarm ; and a kind of levy
of a shilling for each man employed was made upon the
engineering firms in aid of the heavy expenses of the New-
castle masters. In spite of the active exertions of the
" International," several hundred foreign workmen were
imported ; but many of these were subsequently induced
to desert.^ Finally the employers conceded the principal
of the men's demands ; and fifty-four hours became the
locally recognised week's time in all the engineering trades.
This widely advertised success, coming at a time of
expanding trade, greatly promoted the movement for the
Nine Hours Day. From one end of the kingdom to the
other, every little Trade Union branch discussed the ex-
pediency of sending in notices to the emploj'ers. The
engineering trades in London, Manchester, and other great
centres induced their employers to grant their demands
without a strike. The great army of workmen engaged in
the shipbuilding yards on the Clyde even bettered this
example, securing a fifty-one hours week. The building
operatives quickly followed suit. Demands for a diminu-
tion of the working day, with an increased rate of pay per
hour, were handed in by local officials of the Carpenters,
Masons, Bricklayers, Plumbers, and other organisations.
In many cases non-society men took the lead in the move-
ment ; but it was soon found that the immediate success of
the applications depended on the estimate fomied by the
employers of the men's financial resources, and their capacity
- to withhold their labour for a time sufficient to cause em-
barrassment to business. Wherever the employers were
* Here the " International " was of use. At Burnett's instigation,
Cohn, the Danish secretary in London, proceeded to the Continent to
check this immigration, his expenses being paid by the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers.
The Two Policies 317
assured of this fact, they usually gave way without a con-
flict. The successes accordingly did much to create, in
the industries in qi^estion, a preference for combination
and collective bargaining as a means of improving the
conditions of labour. The prevalence of systematic over-
time, which has since proved so formidable a deduction
from the advantages gained b}?- the Nine Hours Movement,
was either overlooked by sanguine officials, or covertly
welcomed by individual workmen as affording opportunities
for working at a higher rate of remuneration.^ On the other
hand, it was a patent fact that the mechanic employed in
attending to the machinery of a textile mill was the only
member of his trade who was excluded from participation
in the shortening of hours enjoyed by his fellow-tradesmen ;
and that his failure to secure a shorter day was an in-
cidental consequence of the existence of legislative restric-
tions. Thus, at the very time that the textile operatives
and coal-miners were, as we have seen, exhibiting a marked
tendency to look more and more to Parliamentary action
for the protection of the Standard of Life, the facts, as they
presented themselves to the Amalgamated Engineer or
Carpenter, were leading the members of these trades to a
diametrically opposite conclusion.
But though faith in trade combinations and collective
bargaining was strengthened by the success of the Nine
Hours Movement, the \dctories of the men did not increase
the prestige of the two great Amalgamated Societies. The
gro\ving adhesion of the Junta to the economic views of
their middle-class friends was marked by the silent aban-
donment by Allan, Applegarth, and Guile of all leadership
in trade matters. Already in 1865 we find the Executive
Council of the Amalgamated Engineers explaining that,
although they sympathised with advance movements, they
felt unable to either support them by grants or to advise
^ With regard to overtime, Burnett informed us that " it was found
impossible to carry a Nine Hours Day pure and simple at the time of the
strike of 1871, and that overtime should still be worked as required was
insisted upon as a first condition of settlement by the employers."
3i8 Sectional Developments
their members to vote a special levy.^ The " backwardness
of the Council of the Engineers " constantly provoked angry
criticism. The chief obstacles to advancement were de-
clared to be Danter, the President of the Council, and the
General Secretary, whose minds had been narrowed " by
the routine of years of service within certain limits. . . .
Never, since it effected amalgamation, has the Society
solved one social problem ; nor has it now an idea of future
progress. Its money is unprofitably and injudiciously in-
vested— even with a miser's care — while its councils are
marked with all the chilly apathy of a worn-out mission." ^
What proved to be the greatest trade movement since 1852
was undertaken in spite of the official disapproval of the
governing body, and was carried to a successful issue
without the provision from headquarters of any leadership
or control. Though the Nine Hours Strike actually began
in Sunderland on April i, 1871, the London Executive
remained silent on the subject until July, Towards the
end of that month, when the Newcastle men had been out
for seven weeks, a circular was issued inviting the branches
to collect voluntary subscriptions for their struggling
brethren. Ultimately, in September, the " Contingent
Fund," out of which strike pay is given, was re-estab-
lished by vote of the branches ; and the strike allowance of
5s. per week, over and above the ordinary out-of-work pay,
was issued, after fourteen weeks' struggle, to the small
minority of the men on strike who were members of the
Society. An emissary was sent to the Continent, at the
Society's expense, to defeat the employers' attempt to bring
over foreign engineers ; but with this exception all the
expenses of the struggle were defrayed from the subscrip-
tions collected by the Nine Hours League.^ And if we turn
"^ Meeting of London pattern-makers to seek advance of wages, Bee-
hive, October 21, 1865.
2 Letter from " Amalgamator," Beehive, January 19, 1867.
^ The rank and file were more sympathetic than the Executive. The
machinery for making the collections was mostly furnished by the branches
and committees of the Society.
Trade Union Apathy 319
for a moment from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
to the other great trade and friendly societies of the time,
it is easy, in the minutes of their Executive Councils and
the proceedings of their branches, to watch the same tend-
ency at work. Whether it is the Masons or the Tailors,
the Ironfounders or the Carpenters, we see the same aban-
donment by the Central Executive of any dominant prin-
ciple of trade policy, the same absence of initiative in trade
movements, and the same more or less persistent S'truggle
to check the trade activity of its branches. In the Amal-
gamated Society of Carpenters, for example, we find, during
these years, no attempt by headquarters to " level up " the
wages of low-paid districts, or to grapple with the prob-
lems of overtime or piecework. We watch, on the contrary,
the branches defending themselves before the Executive
for their httle spurts of local activity, and pleading, in
order to wring from a reluctant treasury the concession
of strike pay, that they have been dragged into the
" Advance Movement " by the more aggressive poHcy of
the " General Union " (the rival trade society of the old
type), or by irresponsible " strike-committees " of non-
society men.
Time and growth were, in fact, reveahng the drawbacks
of the constitution with which Newton and Allan had
endowed their cherished amalgamation, and which had
been so extensively copied by other trades. The diffi-
culties arising from the attempt to unite, in one organisa-
tion, men working in the numerous distinct branches of
the engineering trade, demanded constant thought and
attention. The rapid changes in the industry, especially
in connection with the growing use of new machinery,
needed to be met by a well-considered fiexibihty, dictated
by full knowledge of the facts, and some largeness of view.
To maintain a harmonious yet progressive trade poHcy in
all the hundreds of branches would, of itself, have taxed
the skill of a body of experts free from other preoccupa-
tions. All these duties were, however, cast upon a single
320 Sectional Developments
salaried officer/ working under a committee of artisans
who met in the evening after an exhausting day of physical
toil.
The result might have been foreseen. The rapid growth
of the society brought with it a huge volume of detailed
business. Every grant of accident benefit or superannua-
tion allowance was made by the Executive Council. Every
week this body had to decide on scores of separate appli-
cations for gifts from the Benevolent Fund. Every time
any of the tens of thousands of members failed to get what
he wanted from his branch, he appealed to the Executive
Council. Every month an extensive trade report had to
be issued. Every quarter the branch accounts had to be
examined, dissected, and embodied in an elaborate sum-
mary, itself absorbing no small amount of labour and
thought. The hundreds of branch secretaries and treasurers
had to be constantly supervised, checked by special audits,
and perpetually admonished for negligent or accidental
breaches of the complicated code by which the Society was
governed. The Executive Council became, in fact, absorbed
in purely " treasury " work, and spent a large part of its
time in protecting the funds of the Society from extrava-
gance, laxity of administration, or misappropriation. The
quantity of routine soon became enormous ; and the whole
attention of the General Secretary was given to coping with
the mass of details which poured in upon him by every
post.
This huge friendly society business brought with it, too,
its special bias. Allan grew more and more devoted to
the accumulating fund, which was alike the guarantee and
the symbol of the success of his organisation. Nothing
* An " Assistant Secretary " was subsequently added, and eventually
another. But these assistants were, Hke the General Secretary himself,
recruited from the ranks of the workmen, and however experienced they
may have been in trade matters, were necessarily less adapted to the
clerical labour demanded of them. The great Trade Friendly Societies
of the Stonemasons, Bricklayers, and Ironfoundcrs long continued to have
only one assistant secretary, and no clerical staf! whatever.
Abandonment of the Strike 321
was important enough to warrant any inroad on this sacred
balance. The Engineers' Central Executive, indeed, practi-
cally laid aside the weapon of the strike. " We believe,"
said Allan before the Royal Commission in 1867, " that
all strikes are a complete waste of money, not only in relation
to the workmen, but also to the employers." ^ The " Con-
tingent Fund," out of which alone strike pay could be given,
was between i860 and 1872 repeatedly abohshed by vote
of the members, re-estabhshed for a short time, and again
abohshed. Trade Unionists who remembered the old con-
flicts viewed with surprise and alarm the spirit which had
come over the oncis active organisation. Even the experi-
enced Dunning, whose moderation had, as we have suggested,
dictated the first manifesto in which the new spirit can be
traced, was moved to denunciation of Allan's apathy. " As
a Trade Union," he writes in 1866, " the once powerful
Amalgamated Society of Engineers is now as incapable to
engage in a strike as the Hearts of Oak, the Foresters, or any
other extensive benefit society. ... It formerly combined
both functions, but now it possesses only one, that of a benefit
society, with relief for members when out of work or travel-
hng for employment superadded. . . . The Amalgamated
Engineers, as a trade society, has ceased to exist." ^
It would be a mistake to assume that the inertia and
supineness of the " Amalgamated " Societies was a neces-
sary result of their accumulated funds or their friendly
benefits. The remarkable energy and success of the United
Society of Boilermakers and Iron-shipbuilders, established
in 1832, and between 1865 and 1875 rapidly increasing
in membership and funds, shows that elaborate friendly
benefits are not inconsistent with a strong and consistent
trade polic}^ This quite exceptional success is, we believe,
due to the fact that the Boilermakers provided an adequate
salaried staff to attend to their trade affairs. The " district
delegates " who were, between 1873 and 1889, appointed
* Question 827 in Report of Trade Union Commission (March 26, 1867).
2 Bookbinders' Trade Circular, January 1866.
M
322 Sectional Developments
for every important district, are absolutely unconcerned with
the administration of friendly benefits, and devote them-
selves exclusively to the work of Collective Bargaining.
Unlike the General Secretaries of the Engineers, Carpenters,
Stonemasons, or Ironfounders, who had but one salaried
assistant, Robert Knight, the able secretary of the Boiler-
makers had under his orders an expert professional staff,
and was accordingly able, not only to keep both employers
and unruly members in check, but also successfully to adapt
the Union policy to the changing conditions of the industry.
In short, it was not the presence of friendly benefits, but the
absence of any such class of professional organisers as exists
in the organisations of the Coal-miners, Cotton Operatives,
and Boilermakers, that created the deadlock in the adminis-
tration of the great trade friendly societies.^
The direct result of this abnegation of trade leadership
was a complete arrest of the tendency to amalgamation,
and, in some cases, even a breaking away of sections already
within the organisation. The various independent societies,
such as the Boilermakers, Steam-Engine Makers, and the Co-
operative Smiths, gave up all idea of joining their larger rival.
In 1872 the Patternmakers, who had long been discontented
at the neglect of their special trade interests, formed an
organisation of their own, which has since competed with
the Amalgamated for the allegiance of this exceptionally
skilled class of engineers. Nor was Allan at all eager to
make his organisation co-extensive with the whole engineer-
ing industr3^ The dominant idea of the early years of the
amalgamation — the protection of those who had, by regular
apprenticeship, acquired " a right to the trade " — excluded
many men actually working at one branch or another,
whilst the friendly society bias against unprofitable recruits
co-operated to restrict the membership to such sections of
^ In 1892 the Amalgamated Engineers provided themselves, not only
with district delegates, like those of the Boilermakers, but also with a
salaried Executive Council. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters has
since started district delegates, and the other national societies gradually
followed suit.
Exclusiveness 323
the engineering industry, and such members of each section,
as could earn a minimum time wage fixed for each locaHty
by the District Committee.
This exclusiveness necessarily led to the development
of other societies,- which accepted those workmen who were
not eligible for the larger organisation. The little local clubs
of Machine-workers and Metal-planers expanded between
1867 and 1872 into national organisations, and began to claim
consideration at the hands of the better paid engineers,
on whose heels they were treading. New societies, such
as those of the National Society of Amalgamated Brass-
workers, the Independent Order of Engineers and Machinists,
and the Amalgamated Society of Kitchen Range, Stove
Grate, Gas Stoves, Hot Water, Art Metal, and other Smiths
and Fitters, sprang into existence during 1872, in avowed
protest against the " aristocratic " rule of excluding all
workmen who were not receiving a high standard rate.
The Associated Blacksmiths of Scotland, which had been
formed in 1857 out of a class of smiths which was, at the
time, unrecognised in the rules of the Amalgamated, now
began steadily to increase in membership. Finally, during
the decade various local societies were refused the privilege
of amalgamation on the ground that either they included
sections of the trade not recognised by the rules, or that
the average age of their constituents was such as to make
them unprofitable members of a society giving heavy super-
annuation benefit. To the tendency to create an " aristo-
cracy of labour " was added, therefore, the fastidiousness of
an insurance company.
Many causes were thus co-operating to shift the centre
of Trade Union influence from London to the provinces.
The great trade friendly societies of Engineers, Carpenters,
and Ironfounders were losing that lead in Trade Union
matters which the political activity of the Junta had acquired
for them. The Junta itself was breaking up. Applegarth,
in many respects the leader of the group, resigned his
secretaryship in 1871, and left the Trade Union Movement.
324 Sectional Developments
Odger, who lived until 1877, was from 1870 onwards devot-
ing himself more and more to general politics. Allan, long
suffering from an incurable disease, died in 1874. Mean-
while provincial Trade Unionism was gro\ving apace. The
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, so long pre-eminent in
numbers, began to be overshadowed by the federations of
Coal-miners and Cotton Operatives. Even in the iron trades
it found rivals in the rapidly growing organisations of
Boilermakers (Iron-shipbuilders), whose headquarters were
at Newcastle, and the Ironworkers centred at Darhngton,
whilst minor engineering societies were cropping up in all
directions in the northern counties. The tendency to
abandon London was further shown by the decision of the
Amalgamated Society of Carpenters in 1871 to remove their
head office to Manchester, a change which had the incidental
effect of depriving the London leaders of the counsels of
Applegarth's successor, J. D. Prior, one of the ablest disciples
of the Junta.
But although London was losing its hold on the Trade
Union Movement, no other town inherited the leadership.
Manchester, it is true, attracted to itself the headquarters
of many national societies, and contained in these years
perhaps the strongest group of Trade Union officials.^ But
there was no such concentration of all the effective forces
as had formerly resulted in the Junta. Though Manchester
might have furnished the nucleus of a Trade Union Cabinet,
Alexander Macdonald was to be found either in Glasgow or
London, Robert Knight at Liverpool and afterwards in
Newcastle, John Kane at Darlington, the miners' agents aU
1 Mention should here be made of the Manchester and District Associa-
tion of Trade Union Officials, an organisation which grew out of a joint
committee formed to assist the South Wales miners in their strike of
1875. The frequent meetings, half serious, half social, of this grandly
named association, known to the initiated as " the Peculiar People,"
served for many years as opportunities for important consultations on
Trade Union policy between the leaders of the numerous societies having
offices in Manchester. It also had as an object the protection of Trade
Union officials against unjust treatment by their own societies (see History
of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910, p. 89).
Trade Union Expansion 325
over the country, whilst Henry Broadhurst (who in 1875
succeeded George Howell as the Secretary of the Parlia-
mentary Committee), John Burnett, the General Secretary
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and George
Shipton, the Secretary of the London Trades Council,
naturally remained in the MetropoHs. The result of the
shifting from London was, accordingly, not the estabhsh-
ment elsewhere of any new executive centre of the Trade
Union Movement, but the rise of a sectional spirit, the
promotion of sectional interests, and the elaboration of
sectional poHcies on the part of the different trades.
We have attempted in some detail to describe the internal
growth of the Trade Union Movement between 1867 and
1875, in order to enable the reader to understand the dis-
heartening collapse which ensued in 1878-79, and the subse-
quent spUtting up of the Trade Union world into the hostile
camps once more designated the Old Unionists and the
New. But all the unsatisfactory features of 1871-75 were,
during these years, submerged by a wave of extraordinary
commercial prosperity and Trade Union expansion. The
series of Parliamentary successes of 1871-75 produced, as
we have seen, a feehng of triumphant elation among the
Trade Union leaders. To the httle knot of working men
who had conducted the struggle for emancipation and
recognition, the progress of these years seemed almost
beyond befief. In 1867 the officials of the Unions were
regarded as pothouse agitators, " imscrupulous men, leading
a half idle hfe, fattening on the contributions of their dupes,"
and maintaining, by violence and murder, a system of
terrorism which was destructive, not only of the industry
of the nation, but also of the prosperity and independence
of character of the unfortunate working men who were
their victims. The Unionist workman, tramping with his
card in search of employment, was regarded by the constable
and the magistrate as something between a criminal vagrant
and a revolutionist. In 1875 the officials of the great
societies found themselves elected to the local School Boards,
326 Sectional Developments
and even to the House of Commons, pressed by the Govern-
ment to accept seats on Royal Commissions, and respect-
fully listened to in the lobby. And these political results
were but the signs of an extraordinary expansion of the
Trade Union Movement itself. " The year just closed,"
says the report of the Parliamentary Committee in January
1874, " has been unparalleled for the rapid growth and
development of Trade Unionism. In almost every trade
this appears to have been the same ; but it is especially
remarkable in those branches of industry which have hitherto
been but badly organised." Exact numerical details cannot
now be ascertained ; but the Trades Union Congress of
1872 claimed to represent only 375,000 organised workmen,
whilst that of 1874 included delegates from nearly three
times as many societies, representing a nominal total of
1,191,922 members.^ It is possible that between 1871 and
1875 the number of Trade Unionists was more than doubled.
We see this progress reflected in the minds of the em-
ployers. At the end of 1873 we find the newly estabUshed
National Federation of Associated Employers of Labour
declaring that " the voluntary and intermittent efforts of
individual employers," or even employers' associations con-
fined to a single trade or locality, are helpless against
" the extraordinary development— far-reaching, but openly-
avowed designs — and elaborate organisation of the Trade
Unions." " Few are aware," continues this manifesto, " of
the extent, compactness of organisation, large resources,, and
great influence of the Trade Unions. . . . They have the
control of enormous funds, which they expend freely in
furtherance of their objects ; and the proportion of their
earnings which the operatives devote to the service of their
leaders is startling. . . . They have a well-paid and ample
staff of leaders, most of them experienced in the conduct of
strikes, many of them skilful as organisers, all forming a class
^ Report of the Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, 1874. A table
jirinted in the Appendix to the present volume gives such comparative
statistics of Trade Union membership as we have been able to compile.
What the Employers said 327
apart, a profession, with interests distinct from, though not
necessarily antagonistic to, those of the workpeople they
lead, but from their very raison d'etre hostile to those of the
employers and the rest of the community. . . . They have,
through their command of money, the imposing aspect of
their organisation, and partly, also, from the mistaken
humanitarian aspirations of a certain number of literary
men of good standing, a large army of hterary talent which
is prompt in their service on all occasions of controversy.
They have their own press as a field for these exertions.
Their writers have free access to some of the leading London
journals. They organise frequent pubUc meetings, at which
paid speakers inoculate the working classes with their ideas,
and urge them to dictate terms to candidates for Parliament.
Thus they exercise a pressure upon members of Parliament,
and those aspirant to that honour, out of all proportion to
their real power, and beyond belief except to those who
have had the opportunity of witnessing its effects. They
have a standing Parhamentary Committee, and a pro-
gramme ; and active members of Parliament are energetic
in their service. They have the attentive ear of the Ministry
of the day ; and their communications are received with
instant and respectful attention. They have a large repre-
sentation of their own body in London whenever Parliament
is Hkely to be engaged in the discussion of the proposals
they have caused to be brought before it. Thus, untram-
melled by pecuniar}^ considerations, arid specially set apart
for this peculiar work, without other clashing occupations,
they resemble the staff of a well-organised, well-provisioned
army, for which everything that foresight and preoccupation
in a given purpose could provide, is at command." ^ It is
^ " Statement as to Formation and Objects of the National Federation
of Associated Employers of Labour," December ii, 1873, reprinted by the
Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress. This Federa-
tion comprised in its ranks a large proportion of the great " captains
of industry " of the time, including such shipbuilders as Laird and Har-
land & Wolff ; such textile manufacturers as Crossley, Brinton, Marshall,
Titus Salt, Akroyd, and Brocklehurst ; such engineers as Mawdsley, Son
& Field, Combe, Barbour & Combe, and Beyer & Peacock ; such ironmasters
328 Sectional Developments
not surprising that the Parliamentary Committee of the
Trades Union Congress, composed, as it was, of the " staff
of leaders " referred to, should have had this involuntary
tribute to their efficiency reprinted and widely circulated
among their constituents.
The student will form a more qualified estimate of the
position in 1873-75 than either the elated Trade Unionists
or the alarmed employers. In the first place, great as was
the numerical expansion of these years, the reader of the
preceding chapters will know that it was not without parallel.
The outburst of Trade Unionism between 1830 and 1834
was, so far as we can estimate, even greater than that
between 1871 and 1875, whilst it was far more rapid in its
development. There were, during the nineteenth century,
three high tides in the Trade Union history of our country,
1833-34, 1872-74, and 1889-90. In the absence of complete
and trustworthy statistics it is difficult to say at which of
these dates the sweeping in of members was greatest. But it
is easy to discern that the expansion of 1873--74 was marked
by features which were both like and unlike those of its
predecessor.
Like the outburst of 1833-34, ^^e marked extension of
Trade Unionism in 1872 reached even the agricultural
labourers. For more than thirty years since the transporta-
tion of the Dorchester labourers good times and bad had
passed over their heads without resulting in any combined
effort to improve their condition. There seems to have
been a short-lived combination in Scotland in 1865. We
hear of an impulsive strike of some Buckinghamshire
labourers in 1867, which spread into Hertfordshire. A
more effective Union was formed in Herefordshire in 187 1,
which pursued a quiet policy of emigration, and enrolled
30,000 subscribers in half a dozen counties. But a more
as David Dale and John Menelaus ; such builders as TroUope of London
and Neill of Manchester, and such representatives of the Rreat industrial
peers as Sir James Ramsdcn, who spoke for the Duke of Devonshire, and
Fisher Smith, the agent of the Earl of Dudley.
The^ Farm Labourer 329
energetic movement now arose. On February 7, 1872,
the labourers of certain parishes of Warwickshire met at
Wellesboume to discuss their grievances. At a second
meeting, a Uttle later, Joseph Arch, a labourer of Barford,
who owned a freehold cottage, and had become known
as a Primitive Methodist preacher, made a speech
which bore fruit. On the nth of March two hundred men
resolved to strike for higher wages, namely, i6s. per week
for a working day from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.- Unlike most
strikes this one attracted from the first the favourable
notice of the press. ^ Pubhcity brought immediate funds
and sympathisers. On the 29th of March the inaugural
meeting of the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers'
Union was held at Leamington, under the presidency
^oi the Hon. Auberon Herbert, M.P., a donation of one
hundred pounds being handed in by a rich friend. Through
the eloquence, the revivalist fervour, and the untiring energy
of Joseph Arch, the movement spread like wildfire among
the rural labourers of the central and eastern counties.
^ The immediate publicity given to the agitation was due, in the first
place, to the sympathy of J . E. Matthew Vincent, the editor of the Leaming-
ton Chronicle, and secondly, to the instinct of the Daily News, which
promptly sent Archibald Forbes, its war correspondent, to Warwickshire,
and " boomed " the movement in a series of special articles. A contem-
porary account of the previous career of Joseph Arch is given by the Rev.
F. S. Attenborough in his Life of Joseph Arch (Leamington, 1872; 37 pp.).
See also The Revolt of the Field, by A. W. Clayden (1874), 234 pp. ; and
"Zur Geschichte der englischen Arbeiterbewegung im Jahre 1872-1873,"
by Dr. Friedrich Kleinwachter in Jahrbiicher fiir N ationalokonomie und
Statistik, 1875, and Supplement I. of 1878; "Die jiingste Landarbeiter-
bewegung in England," by Lloyd Jones, in Nathusius-Thiel's Landwirth-
schaftliche Jahrbiicher, 1875 ; The Romance of Peasant Life, 1872, and The
English Peasantry, 1872, by F. G. Heath ; The Agricultural Labourer, by
F. E. Kettel, 1887 ; Joseph Arch, the Story of his Life, told by Himself , 1898 ;
A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, by Dr. W. Hasbach, 1908 ;
"The Labourers in Council," a valuable article in The Congregationalist,
1872 ; " The Agricultural Labourers' Union," in Quarterly Review, 1873 ;
"The Agricultural Labourers' Union," by Canon Girdlestone, in Mac-
millan's Magazine, vol. xxviii. ; "The Agricultural Labourer," by F.
Verinder, in The Church Reformer, 1892 ; and others in this magazine
during 1891-93; Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell, 1878 and
1890 editions; Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders,
by the same, 1902 ; and Village Trade Unions in Two Centuries, by
Ernest Selley, 1919.
M2
330 Sectional Developments
The mania for combination which came over the country
population during the next few months recalls, indeed, the
mushroom growth of the Grand National Consolidated
Trades Union of forty years before. Within two months
delegates from twenty-six counties met to transform the
local society into a National Agricultural Labourers' Union,
organised in district Unions all over the country, with a
central committee at Leamington, v/hich, by the end of
the year, boasted of a membership of nearly a hundred
thousand.^
The organised Trade Unions rallied promptly to the
support of the labourers, and contributed largely to their
funds. The farmers met the men's demand by a wide-
spread lock-out of Unionist labourers, which called forth
the support of Trades Councils and individual societies all
over the country.^ George Howell, then Secretary of the
^ other Labourers' Unions sprang up which refused to be absorbed in
the National ; and the London Trades Council summoned a conference in
March 1873 to promote unity of action. Considerable jealousy was
shown of any centralising policy, and eventually a Federal Union of
Agricultural and General Labourers was formed by half a dozen of the
smaller societies, with an aggregate membership of 50,000.
2 The Birmingham Trades Council, for instance, issued the following
poster :
" Great Lock-out of Agricultural Labourers !
" An Appeal. Is the Labourer worthy of his Hire ?
" This question is to all lovers of freedom and peaceful progress, and
it is left for them to say whether that spark of life and hope which has
been kindled in the breasts of our toiling brothers in the agricultural
districts shall be extinguished by the pressure of the present lock-out.
The answer is No ! and the echo resounds from ten thousand lips. But
let us be practical ; a little help is of more value than much sympathy ;
we must not stand to pity, but strive to send relief. The cause of the agri-
cultural labourer is our own ; the interests of labour in all its forms are
very closely bound up together, and the simple question for each one is.
How much can I help, and how soon can I do it ? If we stay thinking too
long, action may come too late ; these men, our brethren, now deeply in
adversity, may have fallen victims when our active efforts might have
saved them. The strain upon the funds of their Union must be considerable
with such a number thrown into unwilling idleness, and that for simply
asking that their wages, in these times of dear food, might be increased
from 13s. to 14s. per week. Money is no doubt wanted, and it is by that
alone the victory can be won. Let us therefore hope that Birmingham
The Revolt of the Field 331
Parliamentary Committee, George Shipton, the Secretary
of the newly revived London Trades Council, and many
other leaders, gave up their nights and days to perfecting
the labourers' organisations. The skilled trades, indeed,
furnished many of the officials of the new Union. Joseph
Arch found for his headquarters an able general secretary
in Henry Taylor, a carpenter, whilst the Kentish labourers,
organised in the separate Kent Union, enjoyed the serxaces
of a compositor. This help, together with the funds and
countenance of influential philanthropists, made the out-
burst less transient than that of 1833-34. I^^ many villages
the mere formation of a branch led to an instantaneous rise
of wages. But, as in 1833-34, the audacity of the field
labourer in imitating the combinations of the town artisan
provoked an almost indescribable bitterness of feeHng on
the part of the squirearchy and their connections. The
will once again come to the rescue, determined to assist these men to a
successful resistance of the oppression that is attempted in this lock-out.
" The great high priest and dehverer of this people now seeks our aid.
We must not let him appeal to us in vain ; his efforts have been too noble
in the past, the cause for which he pleads is too full of righteousness, and
the issues too great to be passed by in heedless silence. Let us all to work
at once. We can all give a little, and each one may encourage his neighbour
to follow his example. The conflict maj' be a severe one. It is for freedom
and liberty to unite as we have done. We have reaped some of the advan-
tages of our Unions ; we must assist them to estabUsh theirs, and not
allow the ray of hope that now shines across the path of our patient but
determined fellow-toilers to be darkened by the blind folly of their em-
ployers, who, being in a measure slaves to the powers above them, would,
if they could, even at their own loss, consign all below them to perpetual
bondage. This must not be. We must not allow these men to be robbed
of their right to unite, or their future may be less hopeful than their past.
Let some one in every manufactory and workshop collect from those
disposed to give, and so help to furnish the means to assist these men to
withstand the powers brought against them, showang to their would-be
oppressors that we have almost learned the need and duty of standing side
by side until all our righteous efforts shall be crowned by victory.
" All members of the Birmingham Trades Council are authorised to
collect and receive contributions to the fund, and \\-ill be pleased to receive
assistance from others.
" By order of the Birmingham Trades Council,
" W. GiLLiVER, Secretary."
332 Sectional Developments
farmers, wherever they dared, ruthlessly " victimised " any
man who joined the Union. It is needless to say that they
received the cordial support of the rural magistracy. In
aid of a lock-out near Chipping Norton, two justices, who
happened both to be clergymen, sent sixteen labourers'
wives, some with infants at the breast, to prison with hard
labour, for " intimidating " certain non-Union men. An
attempt to punish the leaders of a meeting at Farringdon,
on the ground of " obstruction of the highway," was only
defeated by bringing down an eminent Queen's Counsel
from London to overawe the local bench. The " dukes " —
notably those of Marlborough and Rutland — denounced the
" agitators and declaimers " who had " too easily succeeded
in disturbing the friendly feeling which used to unite the
labourer and his erriployer in mutual feelings of generosity
and confidence." Innumerable acts of petty tyranny and
oppression proved how far the landed interest had lagged
behind the capitalist employers in the matter of Freedom
of Combination. Nor was the Established Church more
sympathetic. At the great meeting held at Exeter Hall
on behalf of the labourers, when the chair was taken by
Samuel Morley, M.P., the only ecclesiastic who appeared on
the platform was Archbishop (afterwards Cardinal) Manning.
In fact, the spirit in which the rural clergy viewed this social
upheaval is not unfairly typified by the public utterance of
a learned bishop. On September 2, 1872, Dr. EUicott, the
Bishop of Gloucester, speaking at a meeting of the Gloucester
Agricultural Society, significantly suggested the village
horsepond as a fit destination for the " agitators," or dele-
gates sent by the Union to open new branches. And the
farmers, the squires, and the Church were supported by the
army. When the labourers in August 1872 struck for an
increase of wages, the officers, in Oxfordshire and Berk-
shire, placed the soldiers at the disposal of the farmers for
the purpose of getting in the harvest and so defeating the
Union.
This insurrection of the village and the autocratic spirit
Soldier Strike-breakers 333
which it aroused in the owners of land and tithe had, we
believe, a far-reaciiing political effect. With its results
upon the agitation for Church disestablishment and the
growing Radicahsm of the counties we are not here con-
cerned. We trace, however, from these months, tlie appear-
ance in the Trade Union programme of the proposals relating
to the Land Law Reform and the Summary Jurisdiction of
the Magistrates, which seem, at first sight, unconnected
with the grievances of the town artisan. But though the
agricultural labourer had his effect upon the Trade Union
Movement, Trade Unionism was not, at this time, able to
do much for him. Funds and personal help were freely
placed at his service by his brother Unionists. The minute-
books and balance-sheets of the great Unions and the Trade
Councils show how warm and generous was the response
made to his appeal by the engineers, carpenters, miners,
and other trades. The London Trades Council successfully
exerted itself to stop the lending of troops to the farmers,
and procured a fresh regulation exphcitly prohibiting for
the future such assistance " in cases where strikes or dis-
putes between farmers and their labourers exist." ^ The
pubKc disapproval of the sentence in the Chipping Norton
case was used by the Trade Union leaders as a powerful
argument for the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment
Act.
But all this availed the agricultural labourer Uttle. The
feverish faith in combination as a panacea for all social ills
gradually subsided. The farmers, after their first surprise,
during which the labourers, in many counties, secured ad-
vances of from eighteenpence to as much as four shillings
per week, met the Union demands and successes by a stoHd
resistance, and took every opportunity to regain their ground.
In 1874 the Agricultural Unions sustained their first severe
defeat. Some of those in Suffolk asked for an advance of
^ Queen's Regulations for the Army for i8jj, Article i8o ; the whole
correspondence is given in the Report of the London Trades Council,
June 1873.
334 Sectional Developments
wages from 13s. to 14s. for a 54-hours week. The farmers'
answer was an immediate lock-out, which was rapidly taken
up throughout the Eastern and Midland counties, no fewer
than 10,000 members of the Union being thus " victimised."
The struggle had to be closed in July 1874, after an ex-
penditure by the National Union of £21,365 in strike pay.
After this the membership rapidly declined. Every winter
saw the lock-out used as a means for smashing particular
branches of the Union. And in this work of destruction
the farmers were aided by their personal intimacy with the
labourer. It was easy to drop into the suspicious mind of
the uneducated villager a fatal doubt as to the real destina-
tion of the pennies which he was sending away to the far-
off central treasury. Nor was the Union organisation per-
fect. Difficulties and delays occurred in rendering aid to
threatened branches or victimised men. The clergyman,
the doctor, and the village publican were always at hand
to encourage distrust of the " paid agitator." Within a
very few years most of the independent Unions had ceased
to exist, whilst Arch's great national society had dwindled
away to a steadily diminishing membership, scattered up and
down the midland counties, in what were virtually village
sick and funeral clubs. With the decline of prosperity of
British farming, which set in about 1876-77, men were every-
where dismissed, grass replaced grain over hundreds of
thousands of acres, and the demand for agricultural labour
fell off ; and even Joseph Arch had repeatedly to advise
the local branches to acquiesce in lower wages. By 1881
the National Union could claim only 15,000 members, and
in 1889 only 4254.^
We have, therefore, in the sudden growth and quick
collapse of this revolt " of the field " a marked likeness to
the meteoric career of the general Trades Unions of 1833-34.
^ The rival Kent Union, which had become the Kent and Sussex
Agricultural and General Labourers' Union, enrolling all sorts of labourers,
claimed in 1889 still to have 10,000 members, with an annual income of
;^io,ooo a year, mostly disbursed in sick and funeral benefits.
Co-operative Production 335
But the expansion of the Trade Union Movement in 1871-75
had another point of resemblance to previous periods of
inflation. In 1871-75, as in 1833-34 ^.nd in 1852, the project
of recovering possession of the instruments of production
seizes hold of the imagination of great bodies of Trade
Unionists. Again we see attempts by trade organisations
to estabhsh workshops of their own. The schemes of Co-
operative Production of 1871-75 bore more resemblance to
those of 1852 than to Owen's crude communism. In the
Trade Unionism of 1833-34 the fundamental Trade Union
principle of the maintenance of the Standard of Life was
overshadowed and absorbed by the Owenite idea of carrying
on the whole industry of the country by national associa-
tions of producers, in which all the workmen would be
included. But in the more practical times of 1852 and
1871-75 the project of " seLf-employment " remained strictly
subordinate to the main functions of the organisation. ^
WTiatever visions may have been indulged in by individual
philanthropists, the Trade Union committees of both these
periods treated the co-operative workshop either as merely
a convenient adjunct to the Union, or as a means of afford-
ing to a certain number of its members a chance of escape
from the conditions of wage-labour. ^ The failure of all
^ See Die Strikes, die Co-operation, die Industrial Partnerships, by
Dr. Robert Jannasch (Berlin, 1868; 66 pp.)-
2 Amid the great outburst of feeling in favour of Co-operative Produc-
tion it is difficult to distinguish in every case between the investments of
the funds of the Trade Unions in their corporate capacity, and the sub-
scriptions of individual members under the auspices, and sometimes
through the agency, of their trade society. The South Yorkshire Miners'
Association used ^30,000 of its funds in the purchase of the Shirland
Colhery in 1875, and worked it on account of the Association. In a very
short time, however, the constant loss on the working led to the colhery
being disposed of, v^-ith the total loss of the investment. The Northum-
berland and Durham Miners in 1873 formed a "Co-operative Mining
Company " to buy a coUiery, a venture in which the Unions took shares,
but which quickly ended in the loss of all the capital. Some of the New-
castle engineers on strike for Nine Hours in 1871 were assisted by sym-
pathisers to start the Ouseburn Engine Works, which came to a disastrous
end in 1876. In 1875 the Leicester Hosiery Operatives' Union, having
2000 members, began manufacturing on its own account, and bought up
a small business. In the following j-ear a vote of the members decided
336 Sectional Developments
these attempts belongs, therefore, rather to the history of
Co-operation than to that of Trade Unionism. For our
present purpose it suffices to note that the loss in these
experiments of tens of thousands of pounds finally con-
vinced the officials of the old-established Unions of the
impracticability of using Trade Union organisations and
Trade Union funds for Co-operative Production. The
management of industry by associations of producers still
remains the ideal of one school of co-operators, and still
periodically captures the imagination of individual Trade
Unionists. But other ideals of collective ownership of the
means of production have displaced the Owenism of 1833-34
and the " Christian Socialism " of 1852. Of co-operative
experiments by Trade Societies, in their corporate capacity,
we hear practically no more.-^
against such an investment of the funds, and the Union sold out to a group
of individuals under the style of the Leicester Hosiery Society. It became
fairly successful, but scarcely a tenth of the shareholders were workers in
the concern, and it was eventually merged in the Co-operative Wholesale
Society. Innumerable smaller experiments were set on foot during
these years by groups of Trade Unionists with more or less assistance from
their societies, but the great majority were quickly abandoned as unsuc-
cessful. In a few cases the business established still exists, but in every
one of these any connection with Trade Unionism has long since ceased.
In later years renewed attempts have been made by a few Unions.
Several local branches of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives,
for instance, have taken shares in the Leicester Co-operative Boot and Shoe
Manufacturing Society. The London Bassdressers, the Staffordshire
Potters, the Birmingham Tinplate Workers, and a few other Societies have
also taken shares in co-operative concerns started in their respective
trades. Full particulars will be found in the exhaustive work of Benjamin
Jones on Co-operative Production, 1894.
^ In one other respect the Trade Union expansion of 1872-74 resembled
that of 1833-34. Both periods were marked by an attempt to enrol the
women wage-earners in the Trade Union ranks. Ephemeral Unions of
women workers had been established from time to time, only to collapse
after a brief existence. The year 1872 saw the establishment of the oldest
durable Union for women only — the Edinburgh Upholsterers' Sewers'
Society. Two years later Mrs. Paterson, the real pioneer of modern
women's Trade Unions, began her work in this field, and in 1875 several
small Unions among London Women Bookbinders, Upholsteresses, Shirt
and Collar Makers, and Dressmakers were established, to be followed, in
subsequent years, by others among Tailoresses, Laundresses, etc. Mrs.
Emma Ann Paterson {nde Smith), who was born in 1848, the daughter of
a London schoolmaster, served from 1867 to 1873 successively as an
Arbitration 337
On the whole the contrast between the Trade Union
expansion of 1873-74 and that of 1833-34 is more significant
than any likeness that may be traced between the two
periods. The Trade Unionists of 1833-34 aimed at nothing
less than the supersession of the capitahst employer ; and
they were met ^y his absolute refusal to tolerate, or even
to recognise, their organisation. The new feature of the
expansion of 1873-74 was the moderation with which the
w^orkmen claimed merely to receive some share of the
enormous profits of these good times. The employers, on
the other hand, for the most part abandoned their objection
to recognise the Unions, and even conceded, after repeated
refusals, the principle of the regulation of industry by Joint
Boards of Conciliation or impartial umpires chosen from
outside the trade. From 1867 to 1875 innumerable Boards
of Conciliation and Arbitration were estabhshed, at which
representatives of the masters met representatives of the
Trade Unions on equal terms. In fact, it must have been
difficult for the workmen at this period to realise with what
stubborn obstinacy the employers, between 1850 and 1870,
had resisted any kind of intervention in what they had then
regarded as essentially a matter of private concern. When
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers offered, in 1851, to
refer the then pending dispute to arbitration, the master
Assistant Secretary of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union and
the Women's Suffrage Association, and married, in 1873, Thomas Paterson,
a cabinetmaker. On a visit to the United States she became acquainted
■with the " Female Umbrella Makers' Union of New York," and strove, on
her return in 1874, to promulgate the idea of Trade Unionism among
women workers in the South of England. After some newspaper articles,
she set on foot the Women's Protective and Provident League (now the
Women's Trade Union League), for the express purpose of promoting
Trade Unionism, and established in the same year the National Union of
Working Women at Bristol. From 1875 to 1886 she was a constant
attendant at the Trades Union Congress, and was several times nominated
for a seat on the Parhamentary Committee, at the Hull Congress heading
the list of unsuccessful candidates. An appreciative notice of her life and
work appeared in the Women's Union Journal on her death in December
1886 ; see also Dictionary of N ational Biography , and Women in the Printing
Trades, edited by J. R. MacDonald (1904), pp. 36, 37.
338 Sectional Developments
engineers simply ignored the proposal. The Select Com-
mittees of the House of Commons in 1856 and i860 found
the workmen's witnesses strongly in favour of arbitration,
but the employers sceptical as to its possibility. Nor did
the establishment of A. J. Mundella's Hosiery Board at
Nottingham in i860, and Sir Rupert Kettle's Joint Com-
mittees in the Wolverhampton building trades in 1864,
succeed in converting the employers elsewhere. But be-
tween 1869 and 1875 opinion among the captains of industry,
to the great satisfaction of the Trade Union leaders, gradu-
ally veered round. " Twenty-five years ago," said Alex-
ander Macdonald in 1875, " when we proposed the adoption
of the principle of arbitration, we were then laughed to
scorn by the employing interests. But no movement has
ever spread so rapidly or taken a deeper root than that
which we then set on foot. Look at the glorious state of
things in England and Wales, In Northumberland the men
now meet with their employers around the common board.
... In Durhamshire a Board of Arbitration and Concilia-
tion has' also been formed ; and 75,000 men repose with
perfect confidence on the decisions of the Board. There
are 40,000 men in Yorkshire in the same position." ^
But though the establishment, from 1869 onwards, of
Joint Boards and Joint Committees represented a notable
advance for the Trade Unions, and marked their complete
recognition by the great employers, yet this victory brought
results which largely neutralised its advantages. ^ As in the
^ Speech quoted in Capital and Labour, June 16, 1875.
2 It must be lemembered that the words "arbitration" and "con-
ciliation " were at this time very loosely used, often meaning no more than
a meeting of employers and Trade Union representatives for argument and
discussion. The classic work upon the whole subject is Henry Crompton's
Industrial Conciliation, 1876. It receives detailed examination in the
various contributions of Mr. L. L. Piice, notably his Industrial Peace (1887)
and the supplementary papers entitled " The Relations between Industrial
Conciliation and Social Reform," and " The Position and Prospects of
Industrial Conciliation," published in the Statistical Society's Journal for
June and September 1890 (vol. liii. pp. 290 and 420). For an American
summary may be consulted Joseph D. Weeks' Report on the Practical
Working of Arbitration and Conciliation in the Settlement of Differences
Joint Boards 339
case of the political triumphs, the men gained their point
at the cost of adopting the intellectual position of their
opponents. When the representatives of the employers and
the delegates of the men began to meet to discuss the future
scale of wages, we see the sturdy leaders of many Trade
Union battles gradually and insensibly accepting the
capitaHsts' axiom that wages must necessarily fluctuate
according to the capitahsts' profits, and even with every
variation of market prices. ^ At Darlington, for instance,
we watch the shrewd leader of the employers, David Dale,
succeeding in completely impressing John Kane and a
whole subsequent generation of ironworkers with a firm
between Employers and Employees in England (Harrisburg, 1879), and his
paper on Labour Differences (New York, 1886). The working of arbitra-
tion is well set forth in Strikes and Arbitration, by Sir Rupert Kettle, 1866
in A. J. Mundella's evidence before the Trade Union Commission, 1868
in his address. Arbitration as a Means of Preventing Strikes (Bradford, 1868
24 pp.) ; and in the lecture by Dr. R. Spence Watson entitled " Boards of
Arbitration and Conciliation and Sliding Scales," reported in the
Barnsley Chronicle, March 20, 1886. An early account of the Nottingham
experience is contained in the paper by E. Renals, " On Arbitration in the
Hosiery Trades of the Midland Counties " (Statistical Society's Journal,
December 1867, vol. xxx. p. 548). See also the volume edited by Dr.
Brentano, Arbeitseinstellungen tmd Fortbildung des Arbeitvertrags (Leipzig,
1890), and Zum socialen Frieden, by Dr. von Schulze Gaevernitz (Leipzig,
2 vols., 1892). The whole subject of the relation between Trade Unions
and employers is fully dealt with in our Industrial Democracy. For the
latest British Official reports on the subject see Cd. 6603, 6952, and 9099.
^ The course of prices after 1870 demonstrates how disastrously this
principle would have operated for the wage-earners had it been universally
adopted. Between 1870 and 1894 the Index Number compiled by the
Economist, representing the average level of market prices, fell steadily
from 2996 to 2082, irrespective of the goodness of trade or the amount
of the emploj-ers' profits. Any exact correspondence between wages and
the price of the product would exclude the wage-earners, as such, from all
share in the advantages of improvements in production, cheapening of
carriage, and the fall in the rate of interest, which might otherwise be
turned to account in an advance in the workman's Standard of Life. On
the other hand, in an era of rising prices, when these influences are being
more than counteracted by currency inflation, increasing difficulty of pro-
duction, or a world-shortage of supply, an automatic correspondence be-
tween money wages and the cost of Uving would be useful, if it did not
lead to the implication that the only ground for an advance in wages was
an increase in the cost of living. The workmen have still to contend for a
progressive improvement of their Standard of Life whatever happens to
profits.
340 Sectional Developments
belief in the principle of regulating wages according to the
market price of the product. The high prices of 1870-73
removed the last scruples of the workmen as to the new
doctrine. In 1874 a delegate meeting of the Northumber-
land Miners decided to use the formal expression of the
Executive Committee/ " that prices should rule wages " —
a decision expressly repeated by delegate meetings in 1877
and 1878. In 1879, when prices had come tumbling down,
we find the Executive still maintaining that " as an Associa-
tion we have always contended that wages should be based
on the selling price of coal," ^ In an interesting letter
dated February i, 1878, Burt, Nixon, and Young (then the
salaried officers of the Northumberland Miners), in describ-
ing the negotiations for a Sliding Scale, take occasion to
mention that they had agreed with the employers that there
should be no Minimum Wage.^ And though the practical
difficulties involved in the establishment of automatic wage-
adjustments hindered the spread of Sliding Scales to other
industries, the principle became tacitly accepted among
whole sections of Trade Unionists. The compulsory main-
tenance, in good times and bad, of the workman's Standard
of Life was thus gradually replaced by faith in a scale of
wages sliding up and down according to the commercial
speculations of the controllers of the market.
The new doctrine was not accepted without vigorous
protests from the more thoughtful working-men leaders.
Lloyd Jones, writing in 1874, warns " working men of the
danger there is in a principle that wages should be regu-
lated by market prices, accepted and acted on, and therefore
presumably approved of by Trades Unions. These bodies,
it is to be regretted, permit it in arbitration, accept it in
negotiations with their employers, and thus give the highest
^ Executive Circular, October 12, 1874.
2 Ibid., October 21, 1879 ; as to the Sliding Scales actually adopted, see
Appendix II.
2 Miners' Watchman and Labour Sentinel, February 9, 1878 — a quasi-
official organ of the Northern Miners, which was published in London
from January to May 1878.
Sliding Scales 341
sanction they can to a mode of action most detrimental to
the cause of labour. . . . The first thing, therefore, those who
manage trade societies should settle is a minimum, which
they should regard as a point below which they should never
go. . . . Such a one as will secure sufhciencj^ of food and
some degree of personal and home comfort to the worker ;
not a miserable allowance to starve on, but hving wages, . . .
The present agreements they are going into on fluctuating
market prices is a practical placing of their fate in the
hands of others. It is throwing the bread of their children
into a scramble of competition where everything is decided
by the bUnd and selfish struggles of their employers." ^ "I
entirely agree," writes Professor Beesly, " with an admirable
article by Mr. Lloyd Jones '^ in a recent number of the Beehive,
in w^hich he maintained that colUers should aim at establish-
ing a minimum price for their labour, and compelhng their
employers to take that into account as the one constant
and stable element in all their speculations. All workmen
should keep their eyes fixed on this ultimate ideal." ^
Nor was this view confined to friendly allies of the Trade
^ " Should Wages be Regulated by Market Prices ? " by Lloyd Jones,
Beehive, July i8, 1874 ; see also his article in the issue for March 14, 1874.
2 Lloyd Jones, one of the ablest and most loyal friends of Trade Union-
ism, was born at Bandon, in Ireland, in 181 1, the son of a small working
master in the trade of fustian-cutting. Himself originally a working
fustian-cutter, Lloyd Jones became, like his father, a small master, but
eventually abandoned that occupation for journaUsm. He became an
enthusiastic advocate of Co-operation, and in 1850 he joined Thomas
Hughes and E. Vansittart Neale in a memorable lecturing tour through
Lancashire. A few years later we find him in London, in close touch with
the Trade Union leaders, with whom he was on terms of intimate friendship.*"
From the estabUshment of the Beehive in 1861 he was for eighteen years a
frequent contributor, his articles being uniformly distinguished by literary
ability, exact knowledge of industrial facts, and shrewd foresight. From
1870 until his death in 1886 he was frequently selected by the various
Unions to present their case in Arbitration proceedings. At the General
Election of 1885 he stood as candidate for the Chester-le-Street Division
of Durham, where he was opposed by both the official Liberals and the
Conservatives, and was unsuccessful. In conjunction with J. M. Ludlow,
he wrote The Progress of the Working Classes, 1867, and afterwards pub-
lished The Life, Times, and Labours of Robert Owen, to which a memoir by
his son, Mr. W. C. Jones, has since been prefijied.
8 Beehive, May 16, 1874,
342 Sectional Developments
Union Movement. We shall have occasion to notice how
forcibly both the Cotton Operatives and the Boilermakers
protested against the dependence of wages on the fluctua-
tions of the market. Alexander Macdonald himself, though
he approved of Joint Committees, instinctively maintained
an attitude of hostility to the innovating principle of a
sliding scale. ^ And, as we shall hereafter see, the conflict
between Macdonald's teaching with regard to both wages
and the hours of labour, and the economic views of the
Northumberland and Durham leaders, presently divided
the organised miners into two hostile camps.
The Trade Union world of 1871-75 was therefore more
complicated, and presented many more difficult internal
problems than was imagined, either by the alarmed employers
or the triumphant Trade Unionists. It needed only the
stress of hard times to reveal to the Trade Unionists them-
selves that they were not the compact and well-organised
army described by the National Federation of Associated
Employers, but a congeries of distinct sections, pursuing
separate and sometimes antagonistic policies.
The expansion of trade, under the influence of which
Trade Unionism, as we have seen, reached in 1873-74 one
of its high-water marks, came suddenly to an end. The
contraction became visible first in the coal and iron indus-
tries, those in which the inflation had perhaps been greatest. ^
The first break occurred in February 1874, when the coal-
miners of the East of Scotland submitted to a reduction
of a shilling a day. During the rest of the year prices and
wages came tumbling down in both these staple trades. In
^ This information we owe to personal friends and colleagues of Mac
donald, Thomas Burt, M.P., and Kalph Young, who, as we have seen,
differed from him on this point, and also on the allied question of regula-
tion of output according to demand, to be preached by the coal-miners as
well as by the colliery companies, which Macdonald, throughout his whole
career, persistently advocated. See, for instance, his speech at the local
conference on the Depression of Trade, Bristol Mercury, I'ebruary 13, 1878.
2 A useful summary of these events is given in Dr. Kleinwachter's
pamphlet, Zur GeschiclUe der englischen Arbciterbeiveguvg in den Jahren
iS-ji und iSy4 (Jena, 1878 ; 150 pp.).
TJie Slump 343
January 1875 a furious conflict broke out in South Wales,
where many thousand miners and ironworkers refused to
submit to a third reduction of ten per cent. The struggle
dragged on until the end of May, when work was resumed
at a reduction, not of ten, but of twelve and a half per
cent, wdth an understanding that " any change in the wage
rates . . . shall depend on a sliding scale of wages to be
regulated by the selling price of coal." ^ In the following
year the depression spread to the textile industries, and
gradually affected all trades throughout the country. The
building trades were, however, still prosperous ; and the
Manchester Carpenters chose this moment for an aggressive
advance movement. The disastrous strike that followed
early in 1877, and lasted throughout the year, resulted in
the virtual collapse of the General Union of Carpenters and
Joiners, at that time the third in magnitude among the
societies in the building trades, and left the Manchester
building operatives in a state of disorganisation from which
they never fully recovered. In April 1877 the Clyde ship-
wrights demanded an increase of wages, to which the
employers replied by a general lock-out of all the operatives
engaged in the shipbuilding yards, in the expectation that
this would cause pressure on the shipwrights to withdraw
their claim. For more than three months the main industry
of the Clyde was at a standstill, the dispute being eventually
ended, in September 1877, by submission to the arbitration
of Lord Moncreiff, in which the men were completely
worsted. In July 1877 a conflict broke out between the
stonemasons and their employers, in which Bull & Co.,
the contractors for the new law courts in London, caused
the bitterest resentment by importing German workmen as
blacklegs. The demand had originally been for an increase
of wages and reduction of hours for the London men ; but
as the obstinate struggle progressed it became, in effect,
a battle between the Stonemasons' Union and the federated
master builders throughout the country. Large levies were
^ Beehive, June 5, 1875.
344 Sectional Developments
raised, and over £2000 collected from other trade societies ;
but in March 1878, after eight months' conflict, the rem-
nant of the strikers returned to work on the employers'
terms. The cotton trade, too, was made the scene of one
of the greatest industrial struggles on record. After several
minor reductions of wages during 1877, which resulted in
local strikes, in March 1878, as the Times reports, " all
the way through a centre of 70 miles, where 250,000 cotton
operatives are employed, notices have been posted giving
a month's notice of ten per cent reduction in wages." A
colossal strike ensued, which brought into prominence the
rival theories of the cotton operatives and their employers.
It was conceded by the men that the mill-owners were losing
money, and that some change had to be made. But as the
employers admitted that their losses arose from the glutted
state of the market, the operatives contended that the
proper remedy was the cessation of the over-production ;
and they therefore offered to accept the 10 per cent reduc-
tion on condition that the mills should only work four days
a week. A heated controversy ensued, but the mill-owners
persisted in their demand for the unconditional surrender
of the men, and refused all proposals for arbitration. The
cause of the men was unfortunately prejudiced by serious
riots at Blackburn, at which the house of Colonel Raynsford
Jackson, the leader of the associated employers, was looted
and burnt. After ten weeks' struggle the men went in on
the employers' terms. ^
1 The operatives' case is well put in the Weavers' Manifesto of June
1878:
" Fellow- workers — We are and have been engaged during the past
nine weeks in the most memorable struggle between Capital and Labour
in the history of the world. One hundred thousand factory workers are
waging war with their employers as to the best possible way to remove the
glut from an overstocked cloth market, and at the same time reduce the
difficulties arising from an insufficient supply of raw cotton. To remedy
this state of things the employers propose a reduction of wages to the
extent of ten per cent below the rate of wages agreed upon twenty-five
years ago. On the other hand, we have contended that a reduction in
the rate of wages cannot either remove the glut in the cloth market or
assist to tide us over the difficulty arising from the limited supply of raw
Widespread Ruin 345
The great struggles of 1875-78 were only the precursors
of a general rout of the Trade Union forces. The increasing
depression of trade culminated during 1878-79 in a stag-
nation which must rank as one of the most serious which
has ever overtaken British industry. The paralysis of
business was intensified, especially in Scotland, by the
widespread ruin caused by the failure of the City of
Glasgow Bank. From one end of the kingdom to the
other great firms became bankrupt, mines and ironworks
were stopped, ships lay idle in the ports, and a universal
feeUng of despondency and distrust spread Hke a blight into
every corner of the industrial world. Every industry had
its crowds of unemplo3'ed workmen, the proportion of
men on the books of the Trade Unions rising, in some
cases, to as much as 25 per cent. The capitalists, as
might have been expected, chose the moment of trial for
attempting to take back the rest of the concessions ex-
torted from them in the previous years. " It has appeared
to employers of labour," stated the private circular issued
by the^ Iron Trade Employers' Association in December
1878, " that the time has arrived when the superfluous wages
material. However, this has been the employers' theory, and at various
periods throughout the struggle we have made the following propositions
as a basis of settlement of this most calamitous struggle :
" I. A reduction of ten per cent, with four days' working, or five per
cent with five days' working, until the glut in the cloth market and the
difficulties arising from the dearth of cotton had been removed.
" 2. To submit the whole question of short time or reduction, or both,
to the arbitrement of any one or more impartial gentlemen.
"3. To submit the entire question to two Manchester merchants or
agents, two shippers conversant with the Manchester trade, and two
bankers, one of each to be selected by the employers and the other by the
operatives, with two employers and two operatives, with Lord Derby the
Bishop of Manchester, or any other impartial gentleman, as chairman or
if necessary, referee. ' '
" 4. To split the difference between us, and go to work unconditionally
at a reduction of five per cent.
" 5. Through the Mayor of Burnley, to go to work three months at
a reduction of five per cent, and if trade had not Sufficiently improved at
that time, to submit to a further reduction.
" 6. And lastly, to an unconditional reduction of seven and a half
per cent."
346 Sectional Developments
which have been dissipated in unproductive consumption
must be retrenched, and when the idle hours which have
been unprofitably thrown away must be reclaimed to indus-
try and profit by being redirected to reproductive work."
The result is reflected in the Trade Union reports. " All
over the United Kingdom," states the Monthly Report of
the Amalgamated Carpenters for January 1879, " notices
of reductions in wages and extended hours of labour come
pouring in from employers with an eagerness and audacity
which contrast strangely with the lessons of forbearance
and moderation so incessantly dinned into the ears of the
British workman in happier times." "At no time in our
history," reports the Executive Council of the Amalga-
mated Society of Engineers, " have we had such a number
of industrial disturbances throughout the country. Bad
trade has prevailed ; and our employers, now better organised
than ever before, seem to have made it their aim to raise
as many points of contention with us as ever possible. In
one place sweeping reductions of wages would be carried
out or attempted ; and in others the rates paid for overtime
were sought to be reduced, while in many cases the hours
of labour have been attacked, and in the Clyde district
successfully, three hours being, as a result, added to the
week's work all over Scotland. . . . Another notable
feature of the depression has been the continued oppression
by the employers of the men in the most submissive districts,
where conciliatory measures were adopted, and where little
objection was made to any innovation. The Clyde district
has been a notable example of this fact, passing in the first
instance through two considerable reductions of wages
almost passively, only to be almost immediately after the
victims of desultory attacks upon the hours question.
Irregular attack appears almost to have been the system
adopted by the employers in preference to the development
of any general movement by their Associations." ^ The
1 Amalgamated Society of Engineers, etc., Abstract Report of tlie
Council's Proceedings, 1878-79, p. 18.
Backwardation
347
years 1878-1880 witnessed, accordingly, a great increase
in the number of strikes in nearly all trades,^ most of which
terminated disastrously for the workmen. Sweeping reduc-
tions of wages occurred in all industries. The Northumber-
land miners, whose normal day's earnings had been 9s. i|d.
in March 1873, found themselves reduced, in November
1878, to 4s. gd. per day, and in January 1880 to 4s. 4d.
Scotch mechanics suffered an even more sudden reduction.
The Glasgow stonemasons, for instance, who had been earning
gd. and lod. per hour during 1877, dropped by the end of
1878 to 6d. per hour, and found it difficult to find employ-
ment even at that figure. A still more dangerous encroach-
ment was made in connection with the hours of labour.
Employers on all sides sought to lengthen the working
■day. The mechanics on the Clyde lost the fifty-one hours
week which they had won. The Iron Trades Employers'
Association, whose circular we have quoted, resolved upon
a general attack on the Nine Hours Day. " It has been
resolved," writes the secretary, " by a large majority of the
Iron Trades Employers' Association, supported by a general
agreement among other employers, to give notice in their
workshops that the hours of labour shall be increased to
the number prevailing before the adoption of the nine hours
limit." 2 The concerted action of the associated employers
was, however, baulked by the energy of John Burnett, then
General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
Placed in possession of the Circular for a couple of hours,
^ See The Strikes of the Past Ten Years, by G. Phillips Bevan (March
1880, Stat. Soc. Journal, vol. xliii. pp. 35-54). We have ascertained that
the strikes mentioned in the Tiwes between 1876 and 1889 show the follow-
ing variations :
1876 ... 17 1881 . . 20 1886 ... 24
1877 ... 23 1882 . . 14 1887 ... 27
1878 ... 38 1883 . . 26 1888 ... 37
1879 ... 72 1884 . . 31 1889 . . . Ill
1880 . . . 46 ! 1885 . . 20 j
^ Secret circular from the London Secretary (Sidney Smith) of the Iron
Trades Employers' Association, December 1878 ; republished in Circular
of Amalgamated Society of Engineers, Januar\' 3, 1S79, and in Report of
Executive Council for 1878-79, p. 31.
348 Sectional Developments
he promptly reproduced it in an ably reasoned appeal to
his own members, which was sent broadcast to the press.
Publicity proved fatal to the employers' plans, and no
uniform or systematic action was taken. Isolated attempts
were, however, made in all directions by the master engineers
to revert to fifty-seven or fifty-nine hours per week ; and
only by the most strenuous action was the normal fifty-
four-hours week retained in " society shops."
Other trades were not equally successful in maintaining
even their nominal day. In many towns the carpenters
had two or three hours pe;>week added to their working
time.^ More serious was the fact that in numerous minor
trades the very conception of a definitely fixed normal day
was practically lost. Even among such well-organised
trades as the Engineers, Carpenters, and Stonemasons the
practice of systematic overtime, coupled with the prevalence
of piecework, reduced the normal day to a nullity. ^ In the
abundant Trade Union records of these years we watch the
progress and results of these economic disasters. The
number of men drawing the out-of-work benefit steadily
rises, until the societies of Ironfounders and Boilermakers,
which in 1872-73 had scarcely i per cent unemployed,
had in 1879 over 20 per cent on their funds. The Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers paid away, under this one
head, during the three years 1878-80, a sum of no less than
£287,596. The Operative Plumbers had to exclude, in the
1 At Manchester, Bolton, Ramsbottom, Wrexham, Falmouth, Alder-
shot, etc., the hours were thus lengthened.
2 To the ordinary reader it may be desirable to explain that the Unions
have, in most trades, succeeded in establishing the principle of the payment
of higher rates for overtime. But in most cases this is limited to workers
paid by time, no extra allowance being given to the man working by the
piece.
It will be obvious that if a workman, ostensibly enjoying a Nine Hours
Day, is habitually required to work overtime, and is paid only at the normal
piecework rate for his work, he obtains no advantage whatever from the
nominal fixing of his hours of labour. To many thousands of men in the
engineering and building trades the nominal maintenance of the Nine
Hours Day meant, in 1878 and succeeding years, no more than this. See
for the whole subject of " the Normal Day," Industrial Democrarv, by
S. and B. Webb.
The Losses 349
two years 1880-82, nearly a third of their members for non-
payment of contributions. The Ironfounders, who in 1876
had accumulated a fund of over £5 per member, paid away
every penny of it by the end of 1879, and were only saved
from actual stoppage by the numerous loans made to the
society by its more prosperous members. The Stonemasons'
Society drained itself equally dry, and resorted to the same
expedient to avoid default. The Scottish societies had to
meet the crisis in an even more aggravated form. -- The total
collapse which followed the City of Glasgow Bank failure
absolutely ruined all but half a dozen of the Scotch Trade
Unions, a blow from which Trade Unionism in Scotland did
not recover for the rest of the century.
The year 1879, indeed, was as distinctly a low-water
mark of the Trade Union Movement as 1873-74 registered
a full tide of prosperity. The economic trials through which
Trade Unionism passed in 1879 are only to be paralleled by
those through which it had gone in 1839-42. But the sohd
growth which we have described prevented any such total
collapse as marked the previous periods. The depression
of 1879 swept, it is true, many hundreds of trade societies
into obhvion. The Unions of agricultural labourers, which
had sprung up with such mushroom rapidity, either collapsed
altogether or dwindled into insignificant benefit clubs. Up
and down the country the hundreds of httle societies in
miscellaneous trades which had flourished during the good
years, went down before the tide of adversity. Widespread
national organisations shrank up practically into societies
of local influence, concentrated upon the strongholds of
their industries. The great National Union of Miners, estab-
Ushed, as we have seen, in 1862-63, survived, after 1879,
only in Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire. Its
younger rival, the Amalgamated Association of Miners,
which had, up to 1875, dominated South Wales and the
Midlands, broke up and disappeared. The National Amal-
gamated Association of Ironworkers, also estabhshed in
1862, which in 1873 numbered 35,000 members in aU parts
350 Sectional Developments
of the country, was reduced in 1879 to 1400 members,
confined to a few centres in the North of England.^ In
some districts, such as South Wales, Trade Unionism practi-
cally ceased to exist. ^ The total membership of the Trade
Union Movement returned, it is probable, to the level of
1871. But despite all these contractions the backbone of
the movement remained intact. In the engineering and
building trades the great national societies, though they were
denuded of their reserve funds, retained their membership.
Nor was it only the trade friendly societies that weathered
the storm. The essentially trade organisations of the cotton
operatives, and of the Northumberland and Durham miners,
maintained their position with only a tem.porary contrac-
tion of membership. The poHtical organisation of the move-
ment was, moreover, unaffected. The local Trades Councils
went on undisturbed. The annual Trades Union Congress
continued to meet, and to appoint its standing ParUamentary
Committee. In short, though many individual Unions dis-
appeared, and many others saw their balances absorbed and
their membership reduced, the trials of 1879 proved that
the Trade Union Movement was at last be^^ond all danger
of destruction or collapse, and that the Trade Union organisa-
tion had become a permanent element in our social structure.
We see, therefore, that the work which Allan and Apple-
garth had done towards consolidating the Trade Union
Movement had not been fruitless. But along with increas-
ing consolidation and definiteness of purpose had come an
increasing differentiation of policy and interest. Each trade
^ The lowest point reached in the statistics of the annual Trades
Union Congresses was in 1881, when the delegates claimed to represent
little more than a third of the numbers of 1874. These statistics of mem-
bership are, however, in many respects misleading. The Congress of 1870
was attended by a much smaller number of delegates than any Congress
since 1872, and the number of Unions represented was also the smallest
since that date.
2 " Four years ago," writes the President of the Bristol Coopers' Society
in 1878, " upwards of 40,000 workmen were in combination in these
valleys [South Wales], and to-day not a single Union is in existence
throughout the entire district" (Paper at Local Conference on the
Depression of Trade, Bristol Mercury, February 13, 1878).
Sectionalism 351
was working out its own industrial problems in its way.
WTiilst the miners and the cotton operatives, for instance,
were elaborating their own codes of legislative regulation of
the conditions of labour, the engineering and building trades
were becoming pledged to the legislative laissez-faire of
their leaders. Under the influence of the able spokesmen
of the northern counties the coal-miners and iron-workers
were accepting the principle that wages must follow prices ;
whilst the cotton operatives, and to some extent the
boilermakers,^ were making a notable stand for the con-
trary view that the Standard Rate of Wages should be a
first charge on industry. And while the miners and cotton
operatives regarded their organisations primarily as societies
for trade protection, there was growing up among the suc-
cessors of the Junta in the iron and building trades a fixed
belief that the really " Scientific Trade Unionism " con-
sisted in elaborate friendly benefits and judiciously invested
superannuation funds. So long as trade was expanding,
and each policy was pursued with success, no antagonism
arose between the different sections. The cotton opera-
tives cordially approved the Nine Hours Movement of the
engineers, whilst these, in their turn, supported the Factory
Bill desired by the Lancashire spinners. The miners ap-
plauded the gallant stand made by the cotton operatives
against the reductions of 1877-79, whilst the cotton opera-
tives saw no objection to the acquiescence of the miners in
the dependence of wages on prices. And though all Trade
Unions regarded with respect the high contributions and
accumulated funds of the Amalgamated Engineers, they were
equall}' respectful of the success with which the Northumber-
land coal-miners, through bad times and good, had for half
a generation maintained, a strong Union with exclusively
trade objects. Thus the divergences of policy, which were
^ See the injunctions of the General Secretary, Monthly Report, March
1862; Annual Reports, 1882 and 1888. Robert Knight consistently
opposed "violent fluctuations of wages, at one time a starvation pittance,
at another exorbitantly high,"
352 Sectional Developments
destined from 1885 onward to form the battle-ground be-
tween what has been once more termed the " Old " Unionism
and the " New," did not at first prevent cordial co-opera-
tion in the common purposes of the Trade Union Movement.
It was in the dark days after 1878-79, when every Union
suffered reverses, that internal discontent as to Trade Union
policy became acute, and a new spirit of criticism arose.
Not until the purely trade society, on the one hand, had
been found lacking in stability, and the trade friendly
society, on the other, had been convicted of apathy in trade
matters ; not until the Lancashire and Yorkshire coal-
miners had been driven to protest against the constant
reductions brought about by the sHding scales, and some of
the leaders of the Lancashire cotton operatives hesitated
in their advocacy of the legal day ; finally, not until a
powerful section of the miners opposed any further exten-
sion of the Mines Regulation Acts, and a section of the
engineers and building operatives began to advocate the
legal fixing of their own labour day — do we find it declared
that " the two systems cannot co-exist ; they are con-
tradictory and opposed." ^
In more than one direction, therefore, the depression
of trade was bringing into prominence wide divergences
of opinion upon Trade Union policy. But the adverse
industrial circumstances of the time were reveahng, in
certain industries, a more invidious cleavage. As manufac-
turing processes develop and change with the progress of
invention and the substitution of one material for another
— iron for wood in shipbuildmg, for instance — the skilled
members of one trade find themselves superseded for cer-
tain work by the members of another. A modern Atlantic
liner, practically a luxuriously-fitted, electric-Ughted float-
ing hotel, built of rolled steel plates, would obviously not
fall within the work of a shipwright like Peter the Great.
But the old-fashioned shipwright naturally refused to re-
linquish without a struggle the right to build ships of every
» Trade Unionism, New and Old, by George Howell, M. P. (1891), p. 235.
Demarcation Disputes 353
kind. The depression of 1879 was severely felt in the ship-
building and engineering trades, every one of which had a
large percentage of its members unemployed. The societies
found, as we have seen, the out-of-work donation a serious
drain on their funds, and were inclined to look more narrowly
into cases of " encroachment " upon the work which each
regarded as the legitimate sphere of its own members.
Disputes between Union and Union as to overlap and
apportionment of work become, in these years, of frequent
occurrence ; and to the standing conflitt mth the employers
was added embittered internecine warfare between the men
of one branch of trade and those of another. The Engineers
complained of the monopoly which the Boilermakers main-
tained of all work connected \\ith angle-iron. The Pattern-
makers protested vigorously against the Carpenters presum-
ing to make any engineering patterns. At Glasgow the
Brassfounders objected to the Ironmoulders continuing to
make the large brass castings which the workers in brass
had at first been unable to undertake. The line of de-
marcation in iron shipbuilding between the work of a ship-
wright and that of a boilermaker was a constant source of
friction. The disregard of the ordinary classification of
trades by the authorities of the Royal Dockyards created
great discontent among the Engineers, who saw shipwrights
put to do fitters' work, and Broadhurst brought the matter
in 1882 before the House of Commons. ^ Nor were the
disputes confined to the puzzling question of the fines of
demarcation between particular trades. In 1877 the re-
cently formed Union of " Platers' Helpers " complained
bitterly to the Trades Union Congress that the whole force
of the Boilermakers' Society had been used to destroy their
1 House of Commons Journals, Motion of March 14, 1882 : " That in
the opinion of this House it is detrimental to the public service, fatal to
the efficiency of our war ships, and unjust to the fitters in Her Majesty's
Dockyards, that superintending leading men should be placed in authority
over workmen with whose trades they have no practical acquaintance, or
that men should be put to execute work for which they are unsuited either
by training or experience." See Henry Broadhurst, the Story of his Life
from a Stonemason' s Bench to the Treasury Bench, by himself, 1901.
N
354 Sectional Developments
organisation. The Platers' Helpers, it may be explained,
constitute a large class of labourers in shipbuilding yards,
who are usually employed and paid, not by the owners of
the yards, but by members of the Boilermakers' Society.
In the building trades numerous cases of friction were
occurring between bricklayers and masons on the one
hand, and the builders' labourers on the other. The intro-
duction of terra cotta led to a whole series of disputes
between the bricklayers and the plasterers as to the trade
to which the new work properly belonged. Disputes of
this kind were, of course, no new thing. What gave the
matter its new importance was the dominance of the great
trade friendly societies in the skilled occupations. The loss
of employment by individual members became in bad times
a serious financial drain on Unions giving out-of-work pay.
In place of the bickerings of individual workmen we have
the conflicts of powerful societies, each supporting the claim
of its own members to do the work in dispute. " When
men are not organised in a Trade Union," says the general
secretary of a large society, " these little things are not
taken much notice of, but the moment the two trades
become well organised, each trade is looking after its own
particular members' interests. . . ." ^
We have in our Industrial Democracy analysed the
history, character, and extent of this rivalry among com-
peting branches of the same trade. Here we need do no
more than record its result in weakening the bond of union
between powerful sections of the Trade Union world. The
local Trades Councils, which might have attained a posi-
tion of political influence, were always being disintegrated
by the disputes of competing trades. The powerful Shipping
Trades Council of Liverpool, for instance, which played an
important part in Samuel Plimsoll's agitation for a new
Merchant Shipping Act, was broken up in 1880 by the
^ Evidence of Mr. Chandler, then general secretary of Amalgamated
Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Labour Commission, 1892, vol. iii.
Q. 22,014).
Failure of Federations 355
quarrel between the separate societies of Shipwrights, Ship-
joiners, and House Carpenters over ship work. The minutes
of every Trades Council, especially those in seaports, relate
innumerable well-intentioned attempts to settle similar
/disputes, almost invariably ending in the secession of one or
other of the contending Unions. These quarrels prevented,
moreover, the formation of any effective general federation.
An attempt was made in 1875 by the officers of the Amal-
gamated Engineers', Boilermakers', Ironfounders', and Steam-
Engine Makers' Societies to estabUsh a federation for mutual
defence against attacks upon the Nine Hours System.
After a few months, the disputes between the Engineers
and Boilermakers on the one hand, and between the mem-
bers of the Amalgamated Society and the Steam-Engine
Makers' Society on the other, led to the abandonment of
the attempt.^ A similar movement initiated by the Boiler-
makers in 1881 equally failed to get established.^
Wider federations met with no better success than those
confined to the engineering and shipbuilding trades. The
Trades Union Congress repeatedly declared itself in favour
of universal brotherhood among Trade Unionists, and the
formation of a federal bond between the different societies.
But the inherent differences between trade and trade, the
numerous distinct types into which societies were divided,
the wide divergences as to Trade Union poUcy which we
have been describing, and, above all, the rivalry for members
and employment between competing societies in the same
industry, rendered any universal federation impossible.
After the Sheffield Congress in 1874, representati^^es of the
leading Unions in the iron and building trades set on foot
^ Abstract Report of Amalgamated Engineers, June 30, 1876.
2 In 1890, however, Robert Knight, who had been throughout the
foremost worker for federation, succeeded in estabhshing a Federation of
the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades of the United Kingdom, described
in our Industrial Democracy, from which the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers has held aloof. A large part of the work of the Federal Executive
consisted, for many years, of adjusting disputes between Union and Union
with regard to overlap and apportionment of work. For the whole subject,
scQonr Industrial Democracy, 1897.
35^ Sectional Developments
a " Federation of Organised Trade Societies," which all
Unions were invited to join for mutual defence. But the
Cotton-spinners, with their preference for legislative regula-
tion, refused to have anything to do with a federation
which contemplated nothing but strike benefits. The whole
scheme was, indeed, more a project of certain Trade Union
officials than a manifestation of any general feeUng in
favour of common action. Each trade was, as we have
said, working out its own policy, and attending almost
exclusively to its own interests. Under such circumstances
any attempt at effective federation must necessarily have
been still-born. Nevertheless the Edinburgh Congress of
1879 called for a renewed attempt ; and the Parliamentary
Committee circulated to every Trade Union in the kingdom
their proposed rules for another " Federation of Organised
Trade Societies." To this invitation not half a dozen replies
were received.^ At the Congress of 1882, when the resolu-
tion in favour of a universal federation was again proposed,
it found little support. The representatives of the local
Trades Councils urged that these bodies furnished all that
was practicable in the way of federation. Thomas Ashton,
the outspoken representative of the cotton-spinners, was
more emphatic. " For years," he said, " the Pariiamentary
Committee and others had been trying to bring about such
an organisation as that mentioned in the resolution, but it
had been found utterly impossible. ... It was all nonsense
to pass such a resolution. It was impossible for the trades of
the country to amalgamate, their interests were so varied and
they were so jealous with regard to each other's disputes." -
The foregoing examination of the internal relations of
the Trade Union world between 1875 and 1879, though in-
complete, demonstrates the extent to which the movement
during these years was dominated by a somewhat narrow
" particularism." From 1880 to 1885 the various societies
^ When, in i8<)o, the project of universal federation was revived, the
draft rules of 1870 were simply reprinted.
2 Report of Manchester Congress, 1882 ; see also History of the British
Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
Universal Sectionalism 357
were absorbed in building up again their membership and
balances, which had so seriously suffered during the con-
tinued depression. The annual Trades Union Congress, the
ParHamentary Committee, and the political proceedings of
these years constitute practically the only common bond
between the isolated and often hostile sections. In all in-
dustrial matters the Trade Union world was broken up into
struggUng groups, destitute of any common purpose, each,
indeed, mainly preoccupied with its separate concerns, and
frequently running counter to the policy or aims of the rest.
The cleavages of interest and opinion among working men
proved to be deeper and more mmierous than any one
suspected. In the followdng chapter we shall see how an
imperfect appreciation of each other's position led to that
conflict between the " Old Unionists " and the " New "
which for some years bade fair to disintegrate the whole
Labour Movement.
Jc
^CHAPTER VII
THE OLD UNIONISM AND THE NEW
[1875-1890]
Since 1875 the Trades Union Congress has loomed before
the general public with ever-increasing impressiveness as
the representative Parliament of the Trade Union world.
To the historical student, on the other hand, it has, during
the last fifty years, been wanting in significance as an index
to the real factors of the Trade Union Movement. Between
1871 and 1875, the period of the struggle for complete
legalisation, the Congress concentrated the efforts of the
different sections upon the common object they had all at
heart. On the accomplishment of that object it became
for ten years Uttle more than an annual gathering of Trade
Union officials, in which they delivered, with placid unanim-
ity, their views on labour legislation and labour politics. ^
^ See the History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis,
of which two volumes have been issued by the Parhamentary Committee
(1910 and 1916). WilHam John Davis, one of the most successful Trade
Union administrators, was born in 1848, at Birmingham. In 1872, when
the National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers was established in a
trade hitherto entirely unorganised, he became General Secretary, a post
which, except for one short interval, he has ever since retained. Within
six months he obtained from the employers the 15 per cent increase which
they had refysed to the unorganised men, and estabhshed branches through-
out the kingdom ; and presently he completed the difiicult and laborious
task of constructing a hst of prices for all brasswork, for which he obtained
the employers' recognition. He was elected to the Birmingham School
Board in 1876, and to the Town Council in 1880. In 1883 he accepted ap-
jtointment as Factory Inspector, but six years later returned to his former
358
The Trades Union Congress 359
From 1885 to 1890 we shall watch the Congress losing its
decorous calm, and gradually becoming the battle-field of
contending principles and rival leaders. But throughout its
whole career it has, to speak strictly, been representative
less of the development of Trade Unionism as such, than
of the social and pohtical aspirations of its leading members.
The reader of the Congress proceedings between 1875
and 1885 would, for instance, fail to recognise our descrip-
tion of the characteristics of the movement in these years.
The predominant feature of the Trade Union world between
1875 and 1885 was, as we have seen, an extreme and
complicated sectionalism. It might therefore have been
expected that the annual meeting of delegates from different
trades would have been made the debating ground for all
the moot points and vexed questions of Trade Unionism, not
to say the battle-field of opposing interests. But though
the Trades Union Congress, Uke all popular assembUes,
had its stormy scenes and hot discussions, from 1875
to 1885 these episodes arose only on personal questions,
such as the conduct of individual members of the committee
or the bona fides of particular delegates. On all questions
of pohcy or principle before the Congress the delegates were
generally unanimous. This was brought about by the de-
liberate exclusion of all Trade Union problems from the
agenda. The relative merits of collective bargaining and
legislative regulation were, during these years, never so
much as discussed. The alternative types of benefit club
and trade society were not compared. The difficulties of
overlap and apportionment of work were not even referred
post at the urgent request of the workmen, whose Union had in his absence
sunk almost to nothing, a condition from which he was able quickly to
restore it to far more than its highest previous strength ; and to take on,
in addition, the secretaryship of the Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube
Makers' Society. He was made a J. P. in 1906. Since 1881 he has been
elected twenty-six times to the Parhamentary Committee of the Trades
Union Congress. He is the author, in addition to the History of the British
Trades Union Congress, of The Token Coinage of Warwickshire and Nine-
teenth-Century Token Coinage (The Life Story of W. J. Davis, by W. B.
Dalley, 19 14).
"5,60 The Old Unionism and the New
o
to. No mention was made of Sliding Scales, Wage-Boards,
Piecework Lists, or other expedients for avoiding disputes.
Piecework itself, when introduced by a delegate in 1876,
was dropped as a dangerous topic. The disputes between
Union and Union were regarded by the Committee as out-
side the proper scope of Congress.^ In short, the knotty
problems of Trade Union organisation, the divergent views
as to Trade Union policy, the effect on Trade Unionism of
different methods of remuneration — all the critical issues of
industrial strife were expressly excluded from the agenda of
the Congress.
For the narrow limits thus set to the functions of the
Congress there was an historical reason. Arising as it did
between 1868 and 1871, when the one absorbing topic was
the relation of Trade Unionism to the law, it had retained
the character then impressed upon it of an exclusively
political body. For many years its chief use was to give
weight to the Parliamentary action of the standing com-
mittee, whose influence in the lobby of the House of
Commons was directly proportionate to the numbers they
were believed to represent, /l^ubhcity and advertisement,
the first requisites of a successful Congress, were worse
than useless without unanimity of opinion. The dehberate
refusal of the Trade Union leaders to discuss internal
problems in public Congress under such circiunstances was
not surprising. Most men in their position would have
hesitated to let the world know that the apparent solidarity
of Trade Unionism covered jealous disputes on technical
questions, and fundamental differences as to policy. They
easily persuaded themselves that a yearly meeting of
shifting delegates was fitted neither to debate technical
questions nor to serve as a tribunal of appeal. But these
difficulties could have been overcome. The quinquennial
delegate meeting of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
^ In 1878, for instance, the Parliamentary Committee resolved that
Congress ought not to interfere either between the English and Scottish
Tailors' Societies or between the Boilermakers and the Platers' Helpers.
The Drawback of Publicity 361
secures absolute frankness of discussion by the exclusion of
reporters ; and the frequent national conferences of miners
achieve the same end by supplying the press with their
own abstract of the proceedings. The Miners' Conference
of 1863, which we have already described, had shown, too,
how successfully a large conference of workmen could
resolve itself, for special questions, into private com-
mittees, the reports being laid before the whole conference
at its public sittings — a device not yet adopted by the
Trades Union Congress. And the Lgndon Society of Com-
positors, which is governed practically by mass meetings,
had, for over half a century, known how to combine detailed
investigation of complicated questions with Democratic de-
cisions on principles of policy, by appointing special com-
mittees to report to the next subsequent members' meeting.
The fact that no such expedients were suggested shows that
in these years the jealousy of most workmen of outside
interference and their apathy about questions unconnected
with their immediate trade interests, made their leaders
unwilling to trust them with real opportunities for full
Democratic discussion.
We shall therefore not attempt to reconstruct the Trade
Union Movement from the proceedings of its annual con-
gresses. The following brief analysis of their programmes
and the achievements of the Parliamentary Committee is
meant to show, not the facts as to Trade Union organisation
throughout the country, with which we have aheady dealt,
but the political and social ideals that filled the minds of
the more thoughtful and better educated working men, and
the rapid transformation of these ideals in the course of
the last decade.^
^ The Congress, from 1871, annually elected a Parliamentary Committee
oJ ten members and a secretary. The members of the Committee were
always chosen from the officials of the more important Unions, with a
strong tendency to re-elect the same men year after year. Between 1875
and 1889 the composition of the Committee was, in fact, scarcely changed,
except through death or the promotion of members to Government
appointments. George Potter was secretary from 1869-71 ; George
Odger in that year ; and George Howell, afterwards M.P., from 1872-75,
N 2
362 The Old Unionism and the New
The mantle of the Junta of 1867-71 had, by 1875, fallen
upon a group of able organisers who, for many years,
occupied the foremost place in the Trade Union .world.
Between 1872 and 1875 Allan and Applegarth were replaced
by Henry Broadhurst, John Burnett, J. D, Prior, and
George Shipton.' These leaders had moulded their methods
and policy upon those of the able men who preceded them.
It was they, indeed, aided by Alexander Macdonald and
Thomas Burt, who had actually carried through the final
achievement of 1875.^ Like Allan, Applegarth, and Guile,
they belonged either to the iron or the building trades, and
were permanent officials of Trade Union organisations. A
comparison of the private minutes of the Parliamentary
Committee between 1875 and 1885 with those of the Con-
ference of Amalgamated Trades of 1867-71 reveals how
exactly the new " Front Bench " carried on the traditions
of the Junta. We see the same shrewd caution and practical
opportunism. We notice the same assiduous lobbying in
the House of Commons, and the same recurring deputations
to evasive Ministers. For the first few years, at least, we
watch the Committee in frequent consultation with the same
devoted legal experts and ParUamentary friends. ^ Through
Henry Broadhurst was for fourteen years annually re-elected secretary
without a contest, temporarily ceding the post, whilst Under Secretary of
State for the Home Department in 1886, to George Shipton. He was
succeeded by Charles Fenwick, M.P., from 1890 93; then followed S.
Woods, M.P., from 1894-1904 ; W. C. Steadman, M.P., from 1905-10;
and the Right Honourable C. W. Bowerman, MP., from 191 1 onwards.
^ Odger died in 1877, Guile in 1883, and Coulson (who had retired
many years before) in 1893.
* To the counsels of Frederic Harrison, E. S. Beeslj', H. Crompton, and
A. J. Mundella was, from 1873, frequently added that of Mr. (afterwards
Justice) R. S. Wright, who rendered invaluable service as a draughtsman.
Henry Crompton supplied us with the following account of the subsequent
separation between the Positivists and the Trade Union leaders :
" In the year 1881 the connection of the Parliamentary Committee
with the Positivists was modified. There was not the same occasion for
their services as there had been. After 1 883, in which year Mr. F. Harrison
and Mr. H. Crompton attended the Congress by invitation, the connection
ceased altogether, though there was no breach of friendly relations. Till
1 88 1 there had been entire agreement between them both as to policy and
means of action. The policy of the Positivists had been to secure complete
Trade Union Politics 363
the skilful guidance and indefatigable activity of Henry
Broadhurst the political machinery of the Trade Union
Movement was maintained and even increased in efficiency.
If during these years the occupants of the " Front Bench "
failed to give so decisive a lead to the Labour Movement as
their predecessors had done, the fault lay, not in the men
or in the machinery, but rather in the programme which
they set themselves to carry out. ■ —
This programme, laid before all candidates for the House
of Commons at the General Election of 1874, was based, as
John Prior subsequently declared, on the principle " that
all exceptional legislation affecting working men should be
swept away, and that they should be placed on precisely
legal independence for workmen and their legitimate combinations ; to
make them more respected and more conscious of their own work ; to lift
them to a higher moral level ; that they should become citizens ready and
desirous to perform all the duties of citizenship. The means employed was
to consolidate and organise the power of the Trades Societies, through the
institutions of the annual Congress and its Parhamentary Committee ; to
use this power, as occasion served, for the general welfare as well as for
trade interests. That the measures adopted or proposed by the Congress
should be thoroughly discussed in the branches, and delegates well posted
in the principal questions. To express it shortly — organisation of collective
labour and pohtical education of individual workmen.
" The condition of this effective force was that, while it was being used
in furtherance of pohtical action, it should be kept quite clear and inde-
pendent of political parties. The divergence came with the advent of the
Gladstonians to office. The Liberal Government began a policy of coercion
in Ireland. Combination was to be put down by the very same mechanism
which had been invented to repress labour combinations — by the law of
conspiracy. The very ruling of Baron Bramwell as to the Tailors' strike
was employed to concoct a law to convict Mr. Parnell and his coadjutors.
As a result law was laid down by the Irish judges as to pohtical combina-
tions, which is binding in England, and has still to be resisted or abolished.
The Positivists endeavoured to the utmost of their ability to rouse the
working classes to a sense of the danger of these proceedings, and to offer
an uncompromising resistance to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.
The Parhamentary Committee would have none of it. They no doubt
beheved that the interests of their clients would be best served by a
narrower pohcy, by seeking the help and favour of the eminent statesmen
in office. Instead of a compact, powerful force, holding the balance be-
tween the parties and the key of the situation, dictating its terms, they
preferred to be the tag end of a party. In the end they did not get much,
but the Congress was successfully capti^red and muzzled by the Gladstonian
Government."
364 The Old Unionism and the New
the same footing as other classes of the community," ^ Its
main items were the repeal of the hated Criminal Law-
Amendment Act of 1 87 1, and the further legalisation of
Trade Unionism. The sweeping triumphs of 1875, and the
acceptance by the Conservative Government of the pro-
posals of the Junta, denuded the programme for subsequent
years of its most striking proposals. There remained over
in this department certain minor amendments of law and
procedure which occupied the attention of the Committee
for the next few years, and were gradually, by their exer-
tions, carried into effect.^
But one great disability still lay upon working men as
such. By the common law of England a person is liable
for the results, not only of his own neghgence, but also
for that of his servant, if acting within the scope of his
employment. The one exception is that, whereas to a
stranger the master is hable for the negligence of any person
whom he employs, to his servant he is not liable for the
negligence of a fellow-servant in common employment. By
this legal refinement, which dates only from 1837, 3-nd which
successive judicial decisions have engrafted upon the common
law, a workman who suffered injury through the negligence
of some other person in the same employment was pre-
cluded from recovering that compensation from the common
employer which a stranger, to whom the same accident
had happened, could claim and enforce.^ If by the error
of a signalman a railway train met with an accident, all the
1 Report of Trades Union Congress, Dublin, 1880, p. 15.
* The working of the Trade Union Act of 1871 revealed some technical
defects in the law, which were remedied by an amending Act in 1876 (39
and 40 Vic. c. 22). Rules, for the execution of the Employers and Work-
men Act were framed by the Lord Chancellor in the same year.
3 This defence of "common employment," which practically deprived
the workman in large undertakings of any remedy in case of accidents
arising through negligence in the works, was first recognised in the case of
Priestly v. Fowler in 1837 (3 Meeson and Wclby). Not until 1S68 did the
House of Lords, as the final Court of Appeal, extend it to Scotland. The
growth of colossal industrial undertakings, in which thousands of workmen
were, technically, "in common employment," made the occasional harsh-
ness of the law still more invidious.
Employers Liability 365
injured passengers could obtain compensation from the
railway company ; but the engine-driver and guard were
expressly excluded from any remedy. What the workman
demanded was the abolition of the doctrine of " common em-
plojmient," and the placing of the employee upon exactly the
same footing for compensation as any member of the pubHc.
By the influence of the Miners' National Union and the
Amalgamated Society of the Railway Servants (established
in 1872) the removal of this disabiUty was, from the first,
placed in the foreground of the Trade Union programme.
Year after year Employers' Liabihty Bills were brought in
by the Trade Union representatives in the House of Com-
mons, only to be met by stubborn resistance from the
capitahsts of both parties. Through the pertinacity of
Henry Broadhurst a partial reform ^ was obtained from
Gladstone's Government in 1880, in spite of the furious
opposition of the great employers of labour sitting on both
sides of the House. The responsibihty of the employer for
insuring his workmen against the risks of their calling was,
for the first time, clearly recognised by Parliament. The
report of the Parliamentary Committee for 1880 claimed
that the main battle on the subject had been fought, and
that " time and opportunity only were now wanting for
the completion of this work." Since then the promotion
of claims for compensation for accidents has been one of
the most important functions of Trade Unions ; and many
of the societies, such as the Bricklayers and Boilermakers,
have recovered thousands of pounds for injured members or
their relatives.^ But the doctrine of " common employ-
^ Act 43 and 44 Vic. c. 52 {1880).
2 The annual Parliamentary returns for the next fifteen years showed
that between three and four hundred cases came into court every j^ear, the
amount of compensation actually awarded reaching between £jooo and
;^8ooo. But a large number of cases were compromised, or settled without
litigation. Meanwhile the relative number of accidents diminished.
WTiereas in 1877 one railway employee in 95 was more or less injured, in
1889 the proportion was only one in 195. Whereas between 1873 and 1880
one coal-miner in 446 met his death annually, between 1881 and 1890 the
proportion was only one in 519 ; although there was apparently less
improvement, if any, as regards non-fatal accidents in the mine.
366 The Old Unionism and the New
ment," modified by this Act, was by no means abolished.
Employers, moreover, were allowed to induce their work-
people to " contract out " of the provisions of the Act.^
An Employers' Liability Bill, the last remnant of the demands
of the Junta, remained, therefore, from 1872 onward a per-
manent item in the Trade Union programme down to 1896.
With the exception of this one proposal the Parhament-
ary programme of the Trade Union world was framed, in
effect, by the New Front Bench. Curiously devoid of interest
or reality, it is important to the poHtical student as showing
to what extent the thoughtful and superior workman had,
at this time, imbibed the characteristic ideas of middle-
class reformers.
The programme of the ParUamentary Committee between
1875 and 1885 falls mainly under three heads. We have
first a group of measures the aim of which was the demo-
cratisation of the electoral, administrative, and judicial
1 By " contracting out " was meant an arrangement between employer
and employed by which the latter relinquish the rights conferred upon
them by the Act, and often also their rights under the Common Law. The
Act was silent on the subject ; but the judges decided, to the great surprise
and dismay of the Trade Union leaders, that contracting out was permis-
sible (see Griffiths v. Earl of Dudley, 9, Queen's Bench Division, 35). The
usual form of " contracting out " was the establishment' of a workman's
insurance fund to which the workmen were compelled to subscribe, and to
which the employer also contributed. Among the coal-miners, those of
Lancashire, Somerset, and some collieries in Wales generally contracted
out. The employees of the London and North-Western, and London and
Brighton Railway Companies also contracted out. In one or two large
undertakings in other industries a similar course was followed. But in
the vast majority of cases employers did not resort to this expedient.
Particulars are given in the Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on
Employers' Liability, 1866 ; the publications of the Royal Commission on
Labour, 1891-94; and Miners' Thrift and Employers' Liability, by G. L.
Campbell (Wigan, 1891) ; and our Industrial Democracy.
In 1893-94 a further amending Bill passed the House of Commons
which swept away the doctrine of common employment, and placed the
workman with regard to compensation on the same footing as any other
person. A clause making void any agreement by which the workman
forewent his right of action, or "contracted out," was rejected by the
House of Lords, and the Bill was thereupon abandoned. The question
was settled in 1896 by the passage, under the Unionist Government, of
the Workmen's Compensation Act, giving compensation in all cases,
irrespective of the employers' default.
Law Reform 367
machinery of the State. Another set of reforms had for
their end the enabhng of the exceptionally thrifty or excep-
.tionally industrious man to rise out of the wage-earning
cl^ss. A third group of proposals aimed at the legal regu-
lation of the conditions of particular industries.
Complete political Democracy had been for over a century
the creed of the superior workmen. It was therefore not
unnatural that it should come to the front in the Trades
Union Congress. What appears peculiar is the form which
this old-standing faith took in the hands of the Front Bench.
The Trade Union leaders of 1837-42 had adopted enthusi-
astically the " Six Points " of the Charter. Even the sober
Junta of 1867-71 had sat with Karl Marx on the committee
of the " International," in the programme of which Universal
Suffrage was but a preliminary bagatelle. To the Front
Bench of 1875-85 Democracy appeared chiefly in the guise
of the Codification of the Criminal Law, the Reform of the
Jury System, the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal,
and the Regulation of the Summary Jurisdiction of the
Magistracy — a curious group of law reforms which it is
easy to trace to the little knot of barristers who had stood
by the Unions in their hour of trial. ^ We do not wish to
depreciate the value of these proposals, framed in the
interests of all classes of the community ; but they were
not, and probably were never intended to be, in any sense
a democratisation of our judicial system. ^ When the Con-
'^ The legal advisers of the Junta realised that the triumph of 1875,
though it resulted in a distinct strengthening of the Trade Union position,
was mainly a moral victory. Though Trade Unions were made legal, the
law of conspiracy was only partially reformed, whilst that relating to
poUtical combinations, unlawful assembUes, sedition, etc., remained, as it
still remains, untouched. Expert lawyers knew in how many ways
prejudiced tribunals might at any time make the law oppressive. The
legal friends of Trade Unionism desired, therefore, to utilise the period of
political quiet in simphfying the criminal law, and in removing as much of
the obsolete matter as was possible. And though State Trials recom-
menced in Ireland in i8Sr, and criminal prosecutions of Trade Unionists
continued in England down to 1891, the interval had been well spent in
clearing away some of the grosser evils.
- In the proposed reform of the Jury laws, for instance, the Parlia-
mentary Committee for several years did not venture, to ask exphcitly for
368 The Old Unio7tism and' the New
gress dealt with electoral reform it got no further than the
assimilation of the county and borough franchise — already
a commonplace of middle-class Liberalism. The student of.
Continental labour movements will find it difficult to beUeve
that in the representative Congress of the English artisans,
amendments in favour of Manhood Suffrage were even as
late as 1882 and 1883 rejected by large majorities,^ Nor
did the Parliamentary Committee put even the County
Franchise into their own programme until it had become
the battle-cry of the Liberal party at the General Election
of 1880. The Extension of the Hours of Polling becomes a
subject of discussion from 1878 onward, but the Paj'^ment
of Election Expenses does not come up until 1883, and
Payment of Members not until 1884.
Scarcely less significant in character were the measures
of social reform advocated during these years. The pro-
minent Trade Unionists had been converted, as we have
already had occasion to point out, to the economic Individ-
ualism which at this time dominated the Liberal party.
A significant proof of this unconscious conversion is to be
found in the unanimity with which a Trades Union Congress
could repeatedly press for such " reforms " as Peasant
Proprietorship, the purchase by the artisan of his own
cottage, the estabUshment of " self-governing workshops,"
the multiplication of patents in the hands of individual
workmen, and other changes which would cut at the root
of Trade Unionism or any collective control of the means of
production. For whatever advantages there might be in
turning the agricultural labourer into a tiny freeholder, it is
obvious that under such a system no Agricultural Labourers'
that payment of jurymen which alone would enable working men to serve,
and contented themselves with suggesting a lowering of the qjialification
for juryman. In 1876, indeed, John Burnett, then a prominent member
of tlie Committee, strongly opposed the Payment of Jurymen on the ground
that it miglit create a class of professional jurors (Trades Unitm Congress
Report, 187O. p. 14).
^ See, for instance, the report of the 1876 Congress, p. 30 ; that of the
i88.i Congress, p. 37 ; that of the 1883 Congress, p. 41 ; and History oj the
British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i.. 1910.
Particularism in Politics 369
Union could exist. However useful it may be to make
the town artisan independent of a landlord, it has been
proved beyond controversy that wage-earning owners of
houses lose that perfect mobility which enables them,
through their Trade Union, to boycott the bad employer or
desert the low-paying district. And we can imagine the
dismay ^^dth which the leaders of the Nine Hours Move-
ment would have discovered that any considerable propor-
tion of the engineering work of Newcastle was being, done
in workshops owned by artisans whose interests as capitalists
or patentees conflicted with the common interests of all
the workers.
In no respect, however, does the conversion of the Trade
Union leaders to middle-class views stand out more clearly
than in their attitude to the clamour from the workers in
certain industries for the legal protection of their Standard
of Life. From time immemorial one of the leading tenets of
Trade Unionism has been the desirabihty of maintaining
by law the minimum Standard of Life of the workers, and
it was still steadfastly held by two important sections of
the Trade Union world, the Cotton Operatives and the Coal-
miners. But to the Parhamentary Committee of 1875-85,
as to the Liberal legislators, every demand for securing the
conditions of labour by legislation appeared as an invidious
exception, only to be justified by the special helplessness
or incompetency of the appUcants. Nevertheless, many of
the trades succeeded in persuading Congress to back up the
particular sectional legislation they desired. The Tailors
asked, on the one hand, for the extension of the Factory
Acts to home workers, and, on the other, for compensation
out of public funds when interfered with by the sanitary
inspector. The Bakers complained with equal pertinacity
of the lack of public inspection of bakehouses, and of the
hardships of their regulation by the Smoke Prevention
Acts. The London Cabmen sought the aid of Congress, not
against their employers, the cab proprietors, but against
the public. The men in charge of engines and boilers
370 The Old Unionism and the New
demanded that no one should be allowed to work at their
trade without obtaining from the Government a certificate
of competency. In the absence of any fixed or consistent
idea of the collective interest of the wage-earning class, or
of Trade Unionists as such, every proposal that any section
demanded for itself was accepted with equanimity by tlie
Congress, and passed on to the ParUamentary Committee
to carry out, however inconsistent it might be with the
general principles that swayed their minds. ^
It is not difficult to understand why, with such a pro-
gramme, the Trade Union world fa^ed, between 1876 and
1885, to exercise any effective influence upon the House of
Commons. A few concessions to the wage-earners were,
indeed, obtained from the Government. The Employers'
Liability Act of 1880, to which we have already referred,
represented, in spite of all its deficiencies, a new departure
of considerable importance. Useful little clauses protecting
the interests of the wage-earners were, through Broadhurst's
pertinacity, inserted in Chamberlain's Bankruptcy Act and
in his Joint Stock Companies Act.- But it was left to
Charles Bradlaugh, who had never been a Trade Unionist,
to initiate the useful law prohibiting the payment of wages
in public-houses, though when it was introduced the ParUa-
mentary Committee (observing that it was unnecessary in
1 In this connection may be mentioned the extensive agitation pro-
moted by Samuel PlimsoU for further legislation to prevent the loss of life
at sea. At the 1873 Trades Union Congress Plimsoll distributed copies of
his book, Our Merchant Seamen, and enlisted, during the next three years,
practically the whole political force of the Trade Union Movement in
support of his Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Bill. The " Plimsoll
and Seamen's Fund Committee," of which George Howell became secre-
tary, received large financial help from the Unions, the South Yorkshire
Miners' Association voting, in 1873, a levy of a shilling per member, and
contributing over ;^iooo. The ParUamentary Committee i ave PUmsoU's
Bill a place in their programme for the General Election of 1S74, and this
Trade Union support contributed largely to Plimsoll's success in passing
a temporary Act in 1875, and permanent legislation in 1876, against the
combined efforts of a strong Conservative Government and the shipowners
on both sides of the House. (See Labour Legislation, Labour Movements,
and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902.)
* Congress Reports, 1882 and 1883.
The Parliamentary Committee 371
respect of organised trades) gave it a mild support. Brad-
laugh it was, too, who in 1887 got passed the amendment
of the law against Truck — a subject which the Parliamentary
Committee had, in 1877, dismissed from their programme
on the ground that they were unable, in the trades of which
they had knowledge, to find sufficient evidence of its neces-
sity.^ But the failure of the Parhamentary Committee to
induce the Government of the day to legislate for wage-
earners as such was naturally most patent in that group
of reforms which dealt with the legal regulation of the
conditions of labour. To the great consolidating Factory
Bill of 1878 they found only four small amendments to
propose ; and of these only one was carried. ^ The " Sweat-
ing System " of home work against which the Tailors and
Bootmakers were suggesting stringent but, as we venture
to think, ill-considered legislation was permitted to expand
free from all regulation. The bakehouses, too, were allowed
to sUp virtually out of inspection. Deputation after depu-
tation waited on the Home Secretary to press for an increase
in the number of factory inspectors, only to be met with
the apparently unanswerable argument that it would cost
money which the poor taxpayers could ill spare, until the
astute and practical leaders of the Lancashire Cotton Opera-
tives grew tired of the monotonous regularity with which
their resolutions in favour of further factory inspection and
more stringent regulations of the conditions of their trade
were passed by Congress, and the httle assistance which
this endorsement procured for them. A " Northern Counties
Factory Act Reform Association " was estabhshed in 1886,
to do the work which the Trades Union Congress and its
Parhamentary Committee had failed to accomplish. We
have, in fact, only one important achievement of the Parlia-
mentary Committee to record in this department of social
reform. For years Congress had passed emphatic resolu-
^ Parliamentary Committee's Report, September 17, 1877.
2 That extending to factory scales and measures the provisions of the
Weights and Measures Act relating to inspection, etc.
372 The Old Unionism and the New
tions in favour of the selection of practical working men as
Factory Inspectors. Great was the jubilation at the appoint-
ment, in 1882, of J. D. Prior, General Secretary of the
Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, and a member of the
Parliamentary Committee, to the post of Inspector.^
In matters of more general interest the Trade Union
leaders were not more successful, though the attempt to
reform the law and its administration resulted in some
minor improvements. The first outcome of the projects
for law reform so dear to the Congresses of 1876-80 was
the Justices' Clerks Act of 1877, which enabled magistrates
to remit costs. The passing of the Summary Jurisdiction
Act of 1879, which gave defendants the right to claim trial
before a jury whenever the penalty exceeded three months'
imprisonment, was, Howell observes, " materially aided by
the action of Congress." But it is needless to inform the
reader that the Criminal Law never got itself codified. To
this day juries continue to be drawn exclusively from the
upper and middle classes. The long agitation for the
abolition of the unpaid magistracy ended in an anti-climax.
The Liberal Government of 1884 left the system unaltered,
but, on the nomination of Henry Broadhurst,- placed four
Trade Union leaders upon the magisterial bench in certain
Lancashire boroughs, a precedent since followed by suc-
cessive Lord Chancellors.
In one direction the Parliamentary Committee saw their
hopes fuUy accomplished. Their adoption of the particular
projects of electoral reform advocated by the Liberal party
enabled them to render effective help in the passing of thi"
Acts of 1885, which assimilated the County and the Borough
Franchise, effected a redistribution of seats, and made the
extended hours of polling universal. But the desire of
successive Congresses for effective labour representation
^ The appointment was first offered to Broadhurst, who elected to
continue his work as Secretary of the ParHamcntar>' Committee, and who
suggested Prior (Henry Broadhurst, the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901).
» Ibid. p. 136.
Liberal Trade Unionists 373
continued to be baulked by the extortion from candidates
of heavy election expenses, and by the refusal to provide
payment for service in Parliament and other public bodies.
On the burning question of the land the Parhamentary
Committee supported with conscientious fervour Gladstone's
Irish policy of creating small freeholds, and enthusiastically
endorsed the proposals of Chamberlain for the extension of
similar legislation to Great Britain. The same spirit no
doubt entered into their support of the provisions of Cham-
berlain's Patent Act, designed to facilitate the taking out
of patents by poor inventors. To sum up the situation, we
may say that the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress
on questions of general pohtics between 1880 and 1884
were successfully pressed on the Legislature only in so far
as they happened to coincide with the proposals of the
Liberal party. With the one great exception of the Em-
ployers' Liability Act, nothing seems really to have called
out the full energies of the leaders. The manifestoes and
published memoranda of the Parliamentary Committee
during these years do not differ either in tone or in sub-
stance from the speeches and articles in which Chamberlain
and other Radical capitaUsts were propounding a programme
of individuahst Radicahsm. In fact, the draft " Address
to the Workmen of the United Kingdom," which the Par-
liamentary Committee, in anticipation of the General
Election, submitted to the Congress of 1885, fell far short
of Cham^berlain's " Unauthorised Programme." It occurred
neither to the Parhamentary Committee nor to the Congress
to suggest the obvious answer to Sir Wilham Harcourt's
financial objection to increased factory inspection. No
trace is to be discovered of any consciousness on the part
of the Trade Union leaders of the existence of a very sub-
stantial tribute annually levied upon the industrial world
under the names of rent and interest. And even Chamber-
lain's modest and tentative proposals of these years, re-
lating to the payment, by the recipients of that tribute, of
some contribution by way of " ransom," found no echo in
374^ The Old Unionism and the New
the official programme of the Trade Union world. Finally,
though the Congress had adopted Payment of Election
Expenses in 1883, and Payment of Members in 1884, the
Parliamentary Committee omitted both these propositions
from its draft, and, hke Gladstone, could not even bring
itself to ask for Free Education. The three latter points
were added to the draft by the Congress.
The assimilation of the poUtical creed of the Trade
Union leaders with that of the official Liberal party was
perfectly sincere. We have already described, in the pre-
ceding chapter, how the Junta had begun to be uncon-
sciously converted from the traditional position of Trade
Unionism to the principle of Administrative Niliilism, then
dominant in the middle class. It is unnecessary for us to
argue whether this conception of the functions of law and
government is or is not an adequate view of social develop-
ment. The able and conscientious men who formed the
Front Bench of the Trades Union Congress of 1876-85 had
grown up without any alternative political theory, and had
accordingly erected the objection to legislative interference
or Governmental administration into an absolute dogma. ^
Laisser-faire, then, was the poUtical and social creed of
the Trade Union leaders of this time. Up to 1885 they
undoubtedly represented the views current among the rank
and file. At that date all observers were agreed that the
Trade Unions of Great Britain would furnish an impene-
trable barrier against SociaUstic projects. Within a decade
we find the whole Trade Union world permeated \v\W\
CoUectivist ideas, and, as the Times recorded as early as
^ It may be mentioned that the Trades Union Congress, which at first
had welcomed addresses from the middle and upper class friends of Trade
Unionism, was, between 1881 and 1883, gradually restricted to Trade
Unionists. At the Nottingham Congress in 18S3, where Frederic Harrison
read a paper on the " History of Trade Unionism," and Henry Crompton
one on the " Codification of the Law," when Frederic Harrison proposed to
take part in the discussion on the I^nd Question, he was not permitted to
do so; and this rule has since been rigidly adhered to. At the Aberdeen
Congress of 1S84 Lord Roscbcn*' was allowed to deUver an address on the
"Federalism of the Trades Union Congress," but thi"; w.i>; fh<" i.itt tin-io
that any one has been invited to read a p>aper.
The New Ferment 375
1893, the Socialist party supreme in the Trades Union
Congress.^ This revolution in opinion is the chief event of
Trade Union historj^ at the close of the nineteenth century ;
and we propose to analyse in some detail the various in-
fluences which in our opinion co-operated to bring it about.
We shall trace the beginnings of a new intellectual ferment
in the Trade Union world. We shall watch this working
on minds awakened by an industrial contraction of excep-
tional character. We shall see it resulting in the revelation
of hideous details of poverty and degradation, for which
deepening social compunction imperatively demanded a
remedy. We shall describe the recrudescence of a revolu-
tionary Utopianism hke the Owenisiji of 1833-34. We shall
trace the gradual schooUng of the impracticable elements
into a sobered and somewhat bureaucratic Collectivism ;
and finally, we shall watch the rapid diffusion of this new
faith throughout the whole Trade Union world. ^
If we had to assign to any one event the starting of
the new current of thought, we should name the wide cir-
culation in Great Britain of Henry George's Progress and
Poverty during the years 1880-82. The optimist and
aggressive tone of the book, in marked contrast with the
complacent quietism into which the English working-class
movement had sunk, and the force of the popularisation of
1 Times leader on the Congress of Belfast, September ii, 1893, which
deplores the remarkable " subservience to Mr. John Burns and his friends "
manifested by the Congress — a subservience marked by the election of
Mr. Burns for the Parliamentary Committee at the head of the poll, and
by the adoption of a programme which included the nationalisation of the
land and other means of production and distribution.
2 The following description of the rise of the " New Unionism " of
1889 is based on minutes and reports of Trade Union organisations, the files
oi Justice, the Labour Elector, the Trade Unionist, the Cotton Factory Times,
the Workman's Times, and other working-class journals. The document-
ary evidence has been elucidated and supplemented by the reminiscences
of most of the principal actors in the movement, and by the personal
recollections of the authors themselves, one of whom, as a member of the
Fabian Society, observed the transformation from the Socialist side, whilst
the other, as a disciple of Herbert Spencer and a colleague of Charles Booth,
was investigating the contemporary changes from an Individualist
standpoint.
376 The Old Unionism and the New
the economic Theory of Rent, sounded the dominant note
alike of the " New Unionism " and of the British SociaUst
Movement. Henry George made, it is true, no contribution
to the problems of industrial organisation ; nor had he,
outside of the " Single Tax " on land values, any intention
of promoting a general Collectivist movement. But he
succeeded, where previous writers had failed, in widely
diffusing among all classes a vivid appreciation of the nature
and results of the landlord's appropriation of economic
rent. It is, in our judgement, the spread among the town
artisans of this conception of rent which has so largely
transformed the economic views of the Trade Union world,
and which has gone far to shift the lines of politics. The land
question in particular has been completely revolutionised.
Instead of the Chartist cry of " Back to the Land," still
adhered to by rural labourers and belated politicians, the
town artisan is thinking of his claim to the unearned incre-
ment of urban land values, which he now watches falling
into the coffers of the great landlords.
But if Henry George gave the starting push, it was the
propaganda of the Socialists that got the new movement
under way. The Socialist party, which became reorganised
in London between 1881 and 18S3, after practically a genera-
tion of quiescence, merged the project of Land Nationalisa-
tion in the wider conception of an organised Democratic
community in which the collective power and the collective
income should be consciously directed to the common benefit
of all.^ Whilst Henry George was, almost in his own
despite, driving Peasant Proprietorship and Leasehold En-
franchisement out of the political field, the impressive
description which Karl Marx had ^iven of the effects of the
Industrial Revolution was interpreting to the thoughtful
workman the every-day incidents of industrial Ufe. It
needed no Socialist to convince the artisan in any of the
great industries that his chance of rising to be a successful
employer was becoming daily more remote. It required no
1 See Mr. H. M. Hyndman's England for All. 1881.
The Advent of tJie Socialists y]']
agitator to point out that amid an enormous increase in
wealth production the wages of the average mechanic re-
mained scarcely sufficient to bring up his family in decenc}^
and comfort, whilst whole sections of his unskilled fellow-
workers received less than the barest family maintenance.
Even the skilled mechanic saw himself exposed to panics,
commercial crises, and violent industrial dislocations, over
which neither he nor his Trade Union had any control, and
by which he and his children were often reduced to destitu-
tion. But it was the Socialists who supplied the workman
with a plausible explanation of these untoward facts.
Through the incessant lecturing of H. M. Hyndman, William
Morris, and other disciples of Karl Marx, working men were
taught that the impossibiUty of any large section of the
working class becoming their own employers was due, not
to lack of self-control, capacity, or thrift, but to the In-
dustrial Revolution, wdth its improvement of mechanical
processes, its massing of capital, and the consequent ex-
tinction of the small entrepreneur by great industrial estab-
lishments. In this hght the divorce of the manual workers
from the ownership of the means of production was seen to
be no passing phase, but an economic development which
must, under any system of private control of industry,
become steadily more complete. And it was argued that
the terrible alterations of over-production and commercial
stagnation, the anomaly that a glut of commodities should
be a cause of destitution, were the direct result of the
management of industry with a view to personal profit,
instead of to the satisfaction of pubhc wants.
The economic circumstances of the time supplied the
Socialist lecturers with dramatic illustrations of their theory.
The acute depression of 1878-79 had been succeeded by only
a brief and partial expansion during 1881-83. A period of
prolonged though not exceptional contraction followed,
during which certain staple trades experienced the most
sudden and excessive fluctuations. In the great industry
of shipbuilding, for instance, the bad times of 1879 were
37^ The Old Unionism and the New
succeeded by a period during which trade expanded by
leaps and bounds, more than twice the tonnage being built
in 1883 than in 1879. ^^ the very next year this enormous
production came suddenly to an end, many shipbuilding
yards being closed and whole towns on the north-east coast
finding their occupation for the moment destroyed. The
total tonnage built fell from 1,250,000 in 1883 to 750,000
in 1884, 540,000 in 1885, and to the still lower total of
473,000 in 1886. Thousands of the most highly skilled and
best organised mechanics, who had been brought to Jarrow
or Sunderland the year before, found themselves reduced to
absolute destitution, not from any failure of their industry,
but merely because the exigencies of competitive profit-
making had led to the concentration in one year of the
normal production of two. " In every shipbuilding port,"
says Robert Knight in the Boilermakers' Annual Report for
1886, " there are to be seen thousands of idle men vainly
seeking for an honest day's work. The privation that has
been endured by them, their wives and children, is terrible
to contemplate. Sickness has been very prevalent, wliilst
the hundreds of pinched and hungry faces have told a tale
of suffering and privation which no optimism could minimise
or conceal. Hide it — cover it up as we may, there is a
depth of grief and trouble the full revelations of which, we
believe, cannot be indefinitely postponed. The workman
may be ignorant of science and the arts, and the sum of
his exact knowledge may be only that which he has gained
in his closely circumscribed daily toil ; but he is not blind,
and his thoughts do not take the shape of daily and hourly
thanksgiving that his condition is not worse than it is ; he
does not imitate the example of the pious shepherd of
Salisbury Plain, who derived supreme contentment from the
fact that a kind Providence had vouchsafed him salt to
eat with his potatoes. He sees the lavish display of wealth
in which he has no part. He sees a large and growing class
enjoying inherited abundance. He sees miles of costly
residences, each occupied by fewer people than are crowded
James Mawdsley 379
into single rooms of the tenement in which he lives. He
cannot fail to reason that there must be something wrong
in a system which effects such unequal distribution of the
wealth created by labour."
Other skilled trades had, between 1883 and 1887, a
similar though less dramatic experience. At the Inter-
national Trades Union Congress of 1886, James Mawdsley,
the cautious leader of the Lancashire cotton-spinners, speak-
ing as a member of the ParUamentary Committee on behalf
of the British section, described the state of affairs in Eng-
land in the following terms : " Wages had fallen, and there
was a great number of imemployed. . .- . Flax mills were
being closed every day. . . . All the building trades were in
a bad position ; . . . ironfoundries were in difficulties, and
one-third of the shipwrights were without work. . . . Steam-
engine makers were also slack, except those manufacturers
who exported to France, Germany, and Austria. With a
few rare exceptions, the depression affecting the great lead-
ing trades was felt in a thousand-and-one occupations.
Seeing that there was a much larger number of unemployed,
the question naturally presented itself as to whether there
was any chance of improvement. He considered there was
no chance of improvement so long as the present state of
society continued to exist. ... He did not understand
their SociaHsm ; he had not studied it as perhaps he ought
to have done. The workmen of England were not so
advanced as the workmen of the Continent. Nevertheless
they, at least, possessed one clear conception : they realised
that the actual producers did not obtain their share of the
wealth they created." ^ We see the same spirit spreading
even to the most conservative and exclusive trades. " To
our minds," writes the Central Secretary of the powerful
Union of Fhnt Glass Makers, " it is very hard for employers
to attempt to force men into systems by which they cartnot
earn an honourable living. These unjust attempts to
^ Report of the International Trades Union Congress at Paris, 1886, by
Adclphe Smith. 1886.
380 The Old Unionism and the New
grind down the working men will not be tolerated much
longer, for revolutionary changes are beginning to show
themselves, and important matters affecting the industrial
classes will speedily come to the front. Why, for example,
should Lord Dudley inherit coal-mines and land producing
£1000 a day while his colliers have to slave all the week
and cannot get a living ? " ^
The discontent was fanned by well-intentioned if some-
what sentimental philanthropists, who were publishing their
experiences in the sweated industries and the slums of the
great cities. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London and other
gruesome stories were reveahng, not only to the middle
class, but also to the " aristocracy of labour," whole areas
of industrial life which neither Trade Unionism nor Co-
operation could hope to reach. With the middle class the
compunction thus excited resulted in elaborate investiga-
tions issuing in inconclusive reports. A Royal Commission
on the Housing of the Poor produced nothing more effectual
than a slight addition to the existing powers of vestries and
Town Councils. Another on the Depression of Trade was
absolutely barren. A Select • Committee of the House of
Lords on the Poor Law failed even to discover the problems
to be solved. Another on the Sweating System ended,
after years of delay, in an accurate diagnosis of the evil,
coupled with a confession of inability to cope with it. In
1885 an Edinburgh philanthropist provided a thousand
pounds for a pubhc conference to inquire whether" some
more equitable system of industrial remuneration could not
be suggested : a conference which served only to cast doubt
on such philanthropic schemes as profit-sharing and the
" self-governing workshop," whilst bringing into prominence
the Socialist proposals.- And, more important than all
these, Charles Booth, a great merchant and shipowner,
began in 1886, at his own expense, a systematic statistical
inquiry into the actual social condition of the whole popula-
^ Flint Glass Makers' Magazine, November 1884.
^ Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1885.
Charles Booth 381
tion of London, the impressive results of which eventually
reverberated from one end of the kingdom to the other. ^
The outcome of the investigations thus set on foot was
an incalculable impetus to social reform. The}^ had, for
the most part, been undertaken in the expectation that a
sober and scientific inquiry would prove the exceptional
character of the harrowing incidents laid bare by the philan-
thropists, and unsparingly quoted by the new agitators.
But to the genuine surprise alike of the economists and the
Trade Union leaders, the lurid statements of the sensation-
aUsts and the Socialists were, on the whole, borne out by
the statistics. The stories of unmerited misery were shown
to be, not accidental exceptions to a general condition of
moderate well-being, but typical instances of the average
existence of great masses of the population. The " sweater "
turned out to be, not an exceptionally cruel capitalist, but
himself the helpless product of a widespread degeneration
which extended over whole industries. In the wealthiest
and most productive city in the world, Charles Booth, after
an exhaustive census, was driven to the conclusion that a
million and a quarter persons fell habitually below his
" Poverty Line." Thirt3^-two per cent of the whole popula-
tion of London (in some large districts over 60 per cent) were
found to be living in a state of chronic poverty, which pre-
cluded not only the elementary conditions of civilisation
and citizenship, but was incompatible with physical health
or industrial efficiency. Moreover, Charles Booth's figures
and the report of the House of Lords Committee on Sweating
disproved, once for all, the comfortable assumption that all
1 The results of twenty years of patient labour by Charles Booth and
his assistants are embodied in the magnificent work. Labour and Life of the
People (London, ist edition, 2 vols., 1889-91 ; 2nd edition, 4 vols., 1893),
reissued in greatly enlarged form as Life and Labour in London, 18 vols. ;
Pauperism and the Endowment of Old Age (London, 1S93) ; The Aged Poor
(1894) ; Old Age and the Aged Poor (1899) ; Industrial Unrest and Trades
Union Policy (1913). In Charles Booth: a Memoir (191S) ]Mrs. Booth
has given a personal biography (1840— 1914) of a tireless investigator who,
merely by the instrument of social diagnosis, got accomplished reforms of
a magnitude that seemed at first wholly impracticable.
382 The Old Unionism and the New
destitution originated in drink or vice. It was impossible,
to use the well-known phrase of Burke, to draw an indict-
ment against a third of the people of London, or against
two-thirds of the East End.
The daily experience of whole sections of the wage-
earners during these years of depression, and the statistical
inquiries of the middle class, appeared, therefore, to justify
the Socialist indictment of the capitalist system. WTiat
was perhaps of more effect was the fact that the Socialists
alone seemed inspired by faith in a radical transformation
of society, and that they alone offered a solution which had
not yet been tried and found wanting. Prior to 1867 it had
been possible to ascribe the evil state of the wage-earners to
the malignant influence of class government and political
exclusion. Cobden and Bright had eloquently described
the millennium to be reached through untaxed products.
For a whole generation the leaders of a consolidated Trade
Unionism had demonstrated the advantageous terms that
the artisan might, through collective bargaining and a
reserve fund, wring from his employers. But in face of a
protracted lack of employment, the extended suffrage, Free
Trade, and well-administered Trade Unions proved alike
helpless. Twenty years of the franchise had left the town
artisan still at the mercy of commercial • gamblers and
exposed to the extortions of the slum landlord. A Liberal
Government was actually in power, wielding an enormous
majority, but manifesting no keen desire to remedy the
results of economic inequality. No attempt was being made
to redress even the admitted wrongs of the necessitous tax-
payer. The Tea Duty remained untouched ; the Land
Tax was left unreformed ; whilst the larger question of
using some of the nation's wealth to provide decent con-
ditions of existence for the great bulk of the people was
not even mooted. A further Extension of the Franchise,
Free Trade, and Popular Education were still the only
social and economic panaceas that the Liberal party had
to offer. But cheapness of commodities was of no use to
The Sick and Burial Club 383
the workman who was thrown out of employment ; and
the spread of education served but to increase his discon-
tent with existing social conditions and his ability to under-
stand the theoretic explanations and practical proposals
of the new school of reformers.
The working man found no more comfort in Trade
Unionism than in party pohtics. The mason, carpenter,
or ironfounder saw, for instance, his old and powerful
Trade Society reduced to httle more than a sick and burial
club, refusing all support to strikes even against reductions
of wages and increase of hours, and only maintaining its
out-of-work benefit by running heavily into debt to its
more prosperous members.^ As the lean years followed
one on another, he saw the benefits reduced, the contribu-
tions raised, and numbers of staunch Unionists left high
and dry as members " out of benefit." The trade friendly
society — the " scientific Trade Unio,nism " of the Front
Bench — was in fact becoming rapidly discredited. John
Bums and Tom Mann, young and energetic members of the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, were, between 1884 and
1889, vigorously denouncing, up and down the country,
the supineness of their great amalgamated Union. " How
long, how long," appeals Tom Mann to the Trade Unionists
in 1886,2 " will you be content with the present half-hearted
poUcy of your Unions ? I readily grant that good work
has been done in the past by the Unions ; but, in Heaven's
name, what good purpose are they serving now ? All of
them have large numbers out of emplo5niient even when
^ The funds of the Stonemasons had been completely exhausted by the
great strike of 1878. In January 1879 the Society determined, on a
proposition submitted by the Central Executive, to close all pending
disputes (including a general strike at Sheffield against a heavy reduction
without due notice) ; and between that date and March 1885, though
many of the branches struggled manfully, and in some cases successfully,
against repeated reductions of wages, increases of hours, or infringements
of the local bye-laws, no strike whatever was supported from the Society's
funds. The case of the Stonemasons is typical of the other great trade
friendly societies.
2 What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to the Workers,
by Tom Mann {1886), 16 pp.
3^4
The Old Unionism and the New
tlicir particular trade is busy. None of the important
societies have any poHcy other than that of endeavouring^
to keep wages from falling. The true Unionist poUcy of
aggression seems entirely lost sight of : in fact, the average
Unionist of to-day is a man with a fossilised intellect, either
hopelessly apathetic, or supporting a policy that plays
directly into the hands of the capitaUst exploiter. . . . I take
niy share of the work of the Trade Union to which I belong ;
but I candidly confess that unless it shows more vigour
at the present time (June 1886) I shall be compelled to take
the view — against my will — that to continue to spend time
over the ordinary squabble-investigating, do-nothing policy
will be an unjustifiable waste of one's energies. I am sure
tliere are thousands of others in my state of mind." ^
' Mr. Tom Mann, one of the outstanding figures in the New Unionist
"Movement, was born at Folcshill. Warwickshire, in 1856, and apprenticed
in an engineering shop at Birmingham, whence he came to London in 1878,
and joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Eagerly pursuing his
self-education, he became acquainted first with the Co-operative Movement,
and then with the writings of Henry George. In 1884 he visited the United
States, where he worked for six months. On his return he joined the
Batter-sea Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, and quickly became
one of its leading speakers. His experience of the evils of overtime made
the Eight Hours Day a prominent feature in his lectures, and in 1SS6 he
published his views in the pamphlet, What a Compulsory Eight Hours
Working Day means to the Workers (1886, 16 pp.), of which .several editions
have been printed. In the same year he left his trade in order to devote
himself to the provincial propaganda of the Social Democratic Federation,
spending over two years incessantly lecturing, first about T>Tieside, and
tiien in Lancashire. Returning to London early in 1889. he assisted in
establishing the Gasworkers' Union and in organising the great dock strike.
on the termination of which he was elected President of the Dockers' Union
For three years he applied himself to building up this organisation, deciding
to resign in 1S92, when he became a candidate for the General Secretary-
ship of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. After an exciting contest,
during whicli he addressed meetings of the members in all the great
engineering centres, he failed of success only by 951 votes on a poll of
35,99-- In the meantime he had been appointed, in 1891, a member of
the Royal Commission on Labour, to which he submitted a striking scheme
for consolidating the whole dock business of the port of London, by cutting
a new channel for the Thames .icross the Isle of Dogs. On the establish
ment in 1S03 of the London Reform Union he was appointed its secretary,
a post which he relinquished in 1894 on being elected secretary of the
Independent Labour Party. This he presently relinquished to emigrate
to New Zealand ; and there and in Australia he threw himself energetically
into Trade Union agitation. Returning to England in 1911. he became a
John Burns 385
" Constituted as it is," writes John Burns in September
1887/ " Unionism carries within itself the source of its own
dissolution. . . . Their reckless assumption of the duties
and responsibilities that only the State or whole community
can discharge, in the nature of sick and superannuation
benefits, at the instance of the middle class, is crushing out
the larger Unions by taxing their members to an unbearable
extent. This so cripples them that the fear of being unable
to discharge their friendly society liabilities often makes
them submit to encroachments by the masters without
protest. The result of this is that all of them have ceased
to be Unions for maintaining the rights of labour, and have
degenerated into mere middle and upper class rate-reducing
institutions." ^
fervent advocate of Syndicalism ; and then became an organiser for
various General Labour Unions. In 1919 he was elected General Secretary
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, after an exhaustive ballot of
its great membership.
^ Article in Justice, September 3, 1887.
2 Mr. John Burns, in many respects the most striking personality in
the Labour Movement, was born at Battersea in 1859, and was apprenticed
to a local engineering firm. Alreadj' during his apprenticeship he made his
voice heard in public, in 1877 being actually arrested for persistently
speaking on Clapham Common, and in 1878 braving the " Jingo " mob at
a Hyde Park demonstration. As soon as he was out of his time (1879) he
joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and became an advocate
of shorter hours of labour. An engagement as engineer on the Niger,
West Africa, during 1880-81, gave him leisure to read, which he utilised by
mastering Adam Smith and J. S. Mill. Returning to London, he worked
side by side with Victor Delahaye, an ex-Communard, who was afterwards
one of the French representatives at the Berlin Labour Conference, 1891,
and with whom he had many talks on the advancement of labour. In
1883 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, and at once became its
leading working-class member, championing its cause, for instance, in an
impressive speech at the Industrial Remuneration Conference in 1885. In
the same year he was elected by his district of the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers as its representative at the quinquennial delegate meeting of
the Society, where he found himself the youngest member. At the General
Election of 1885 he stood as Socialist candidate for ^^■est Nottingham,
receiving 598 votes. For the next two years he became known as the
leader of the London "unemployed" agitation. His prosecution for
sedition in 1886 (with three other prominent members of the Social Demo-
cratic Federation) aroused considerable interest, and on his acquittal his
speech for the defence, The Man with the Red Flag, had a large sale in
pamphlet form (188O; 16 pp.)- At the prohibited demonstration at
O
386 The Old Unionism and the New •
Here we see the beginning of that agitation against tlie
combination of friendly benefits with trade protection aims
which subsequently became, for a short time, one of the
characteristics of the "New Unionism." But if the trade
friendly society withered up during these years into a mere
benefit club, the purely trade society showed no greater
vitality. The great depression of 1878-79 had swept out of
existence hundreds of little local Unions which lacked the
, cohesion given by the friendly society side. The Lancashire
and Midland Miners' organisations, which gave no benefits,
had either collapsed altogether, or had dissolved into
isolated pit clubs, incapable of combined action. The
Lancashire cotton operatives, the Northumberland and
Durham miners, and a few other essentially trade societies,
held together only by surrendering to the employers one
concession after another. With capitalists ready at any
moment to suspend a profitless business, collective bar-
gaining proved as powerless to avert reductions as the
individual contract. In face of a long-continued depression
of trade, marked by frequent oscillations in particular
industries, both types of Trade Unionism, it seemed, had
been tried and found wanting.
These were the circumstances under which the dis-
illusioned working-class politician or Trade Unionist was
reached by the lectures and writings of the Socialists, who
Trafalgar Square on "Bloody Sunday" (November 13, 1887)-, in con-
junction with Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., he broke through the police
line, for which they were botii sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment. In
January 1889 he was elected for Battersea to the new London County
Council, on which he became one of the most useful and influential mem-
bers. His magnificent work in the dock strike and in organising the
unskilled labourers is described in the text. At the General Election of
1892 he was chosen, by a large majority, M.P. for Battersea, and at the
Trades Union Congress i« 1893 he received the largest number of votes
for the Parliamentary Committee, of which he accordingly became Chair-
man. In 1906 he was appointed President of the Local Government
Board in Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman's Government, with a seat in the
Cabinet — thus becoming the first working - man Cabinet Minister — a
post which he licld until August 1914, when he resigned on the outbreak of
war. He retained his seat in Parliament until 1918, when he retired.
The Unemployed 387
offered him not only a sympathetic explanation of the ills
from which he suffered, but also a comprehensive scheme
of social reform, extending from an Eight Hours Bill to
the Nationalisation of the Means of Production. In a
purely historical essay it is unnecessary for us to discuss
the vaUdity of the optimistic confidence with which the
Sociahsts of these years declared that under a s^'stem of
collective ownership the workers would not only be ensured
at all times a competent liveUhood, but would themselves
control the administration of the surplus wealth of the nation.
But in tracing the causes of the New Unionism of 1889-90,
and the transformation of the Trade Union Movement from
an IndividuaHst to a Collectivist influence in the political
world, we venture to ascribe a large share to the superior
attractiveness of this buoyant faith over anything offered
by the almost C3mical fatalism of the old school.
The Socialist agitation benefited between 1886 and 1889
by a series of undesigned advertisements. Meetings of " the
unemployed " in February 1886 led to unexpected riots,
which threw all London into a panic, and were followed by
a Government prosecution for sedition. Hyndman, Burns,
Champion, and Williams, as the leaders of the Social Demo-
cratic Federation, were indicted at the Old Bailey, and their
trial, ending in an acquittal, attracted the attention of the
whole country to their doctrines. The " Unemployed "
gatherings went on wdth ever-increasing noise until Novem-
ber 1887, when the Chief Commissioner of Pohce issued a
proclamation prohibiting meetings in Trafalgar Square,
which had for a whole generation served as the forum of
the London agitator. This " attack on free speech " by
a Conservative Government, coming after several minor
attempts to suppress open-air meetings b}' its Liberal pre-
decessor, rallied the forces of London artisan RadicaHsm
to those of the Socialists. A gigantic demonstration on
Sunday, November 13, 1887, was held in defiance of the
police, only to be repulsed from Trafalgar Square by a free
use of the pohce bludgeon and the calling out of both
388 The Old Unionism and the New
cavalry and infantry. John Burns and Cunninghame
Graham, M.P., were imprisoned for their share in this
transaction. A similar agitation on a smaller scale was
going on in the provinces. On Tyneside and in the Mid-
lands numerous emissaries of the Social Democratic Federa-
tion and the Socialist League were spreading the revolt
against the helpless apathy into which the Trade Unions
had sunk. In every large industrial centre the indefatigable
lecturing of branches of Socialist organisations was stirring
up a vague but effective unrest in all except the official
circle of the Trade Union world.
To the great army of unskilled, or only partially skilled,
workmen concentrated in London and other large cities the
new crusade came as a gospel of deliverance. The unskilled
labourer was getting tired of being referred, as the sole
means of bettering his condition, to the " scientific Trade
Unionism " alone recognised by the Front Bench. Trade
Societies which admitted only workmen earning a high
standard rate, which exacted a weekly contribution of not
less than a shilling, and which frequently excluded all but
regularly apprenticed men, were regarded by the builders'
labourer, the gas stoker, or the docker, as aristocratic corpora-
tions with which he had as little in common as with the
House of Lords. " The great bulk of our labourers," writes
John Burns, " are ignored by the skilled workers. It is
this selfish, snobbish desertion by the higher grades of the
lower that makes success in many disputes impossible.
Ostracised by their fellows, a spirit of revenge alone often
prompts men to oppose or remain indifferent to Unionism,
when if the Unions were wiser and more conciliatory, support
would have been forthcoming where now jealous}' and dis-
content prevails." ^ Even among the skilled workers, the
younger artisans, if they had joined their Unions at all,
were discontented with the exclusive and apathetic policy
of the older members. Thus we find rising up. in such
" aristocratic " Unions as the Amalgamated Society of
* Address to Trade Unionists in Justice, January 24, 1885.
Adam Weiler 389
Engineers and the London Society of Compositors, a " New
Unionist " party of young men, who vigorously objected to
the degradation of a Trade Union into a mutual insurance
company, who protested against the exclusion of the lowly
paid sections from the organisation of the trade, and who
advocated the use of the political influence of the Society
in the interests of Social-Democracy. By 1888 the Socialists
had not only secured the allegiance of large sections of the
unskilled labourers in London and some other towns, but
had obtained an important body of recruits in the great
" Amalgamated " societies.
At this pass nothing short of strangulation could have
kept the new spirit out of the Trade Union Congress. It
is interesting to notice that the first sign among the delegates
is to be ascribed to the direct influence of Karl Marx. At
the 1878 Congress at Bristol we find Adam Weiler, an old
member of the " International," and a personal friend of
the great Sociahst, reading a paper in which he advocated
legislation to hmit the hours of labour.^ At the next
Congress Weiler took exception to the resolution in favour
of esto.bhshing a Peasant Proprietorship moved on behalf
of the Parliamentary Committee. But in that year his
amendment in favour of Land Nationahsation did not even
find a seconder. Three years later the effect of Henry
George's propaganda becomes visible. In 1882, when the
land question was again raised, the two ideals were sharply
^ Weiler was the delegate of the Alhance Cabinetmakers' Society, and
came from London. The Congress Report gives the following account of
his paper : " After revie^ving the position of the working classes under
the present system, and comparing it with the state of things eighty years
ago, he contended that the best means of bettering their position was to
reduce the hours of toil. The result of this would be, first, to give every
worker a better chance of employment, and thus lessen that sort of com-
petition which was caused by hunger and want ; secondly, it would give
them time and opportunity for rest and amusement, and that cultivation
of their minds which would enable them to prepare themselves for the time
when the present system of production would collapse, and the time of
this collapse was not so distant as some supposed." The paper was
received with much applause, and Weiler received the thanks of Congress.
No resolution was passed.
390 The Old Unionism and the New
contrasted, and in spite of protests against " communistic
principles," a rider declaring for nationalisation was adopted
by 71 votes to 31. The Parliamentary Committee made no
change in their attitude on the question, contending that
the vote had been taken in the absence of many delegates,
and that it did not represent the opinion of the Congress
as a whole. This contention \Yas to some extent borne out
by the votes of the next five Congresses, at all of which
amendments in favour of the principle of nationalisation
were rejected, though by decreasing majorities. At length,
in 1887, at the Swansea Congress, the tide turned, and a
vague addendum in favour of Land Nationalisation was
accepted.^ At the Bradford Congress in 1888 the very idea
of Peasant Proprietorship had disappeared. The represent-
atives of the agricultural labourers now asked only for
individual occupation of publicly owned allotments. Ulti-
mately the Congress adopted by 66 votes to 5 a distinct
declaration in favour of Land Nationalisation, coupled with
an instruction to the Parliamentary Committee to bring
the proposal before the House of Commons.
Meanwhile Weiler had made another and more successful
attempt to enlist the aid of the Congress in the legal regu-
lation of the hours of labour. At the 1883 Congress he
moved a resolution which instructed the Parliamentary
Committee to obtain the legal limitation to eight hours of
the maximum day of all workers in the employment of
public authorities, or companies exercising Parliamentary
powers. This was seconded by Edward Harford, the
General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railwaj^
Servants, and carried, in a thin meeting, by only 33 to 8.
In 1885 the movement had so far gained weight that the
Parliamentary Committee thought it expedient to tem-
porise by promoting an investigation into the amount of
overtime worked in Government departments, with the
result of demonstrating how completely the practice of
^ History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i.
P- 133-
The Eight Hours Bill 391
systematic overtime had neutralised the Nine Hours victor}^^
At the 1887 Congress at Swansea the Parhamentary Com-
mittee were instructed to take a vote of the Trade Union
world upon the whole question, a vote which revealed the
unexpected fact that Applegarth's own Union, the Amal-
gamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, had been con-
verted to an Eight Hours Bill.^ A second plebiscite, taken
at the instance of the following year's Congress, showed that
such old Unions as the Compositors, the Ironfounders, and
the Railway Servants were swinging round. ^
In the meantime the growing divergence of policy among
the coal-miners, which we foreshadowed in the last chapter,
had brought a powerful contingent of organised workmen to
the support of the new party. We have alread}^ described
the conversion of the leaders of the Northumberland and
Durham miners to the principle of the Sliding Scale, in-
volving, as it did, the dependence of the worker's standard of
comfort upon the market price of his product. On another
point, too, the two northern counties had broken away from
the traditional pohcy of the Miners' organisation. Already
in 1863 we noted that Crawford, one of the ablest of their
leaders, was vigorously objecting, at the Leeds Conference,
to an Eight Hours Bill for boys, on the ground that in
Northumberland and Durham, where the hewers often
worked in two shifts, such a restriction would interfere
with the men's convenience. This resistance to a particular
1 The Return moved for by George Howell regarding the Woolwich
and Enfield engineering works showed that, during 1884 and 1885, more
than half the artisans worked overtime, the average per week for each man
var\-ing from 9.4 hours in some shops to 17.8 in others.
2 11,966 of its members voted for an Eight Hours Day^ and of these
9209 declared in favour of the enforcement of the eight hours limit by
law. The total votes given for an Eight Hours Law was 17,267 ; against
It, 3819.
^ The votes in favour of an Eight Hours Day were 39,656 ; against
it, 67,390, of which 56,541 were cast on behalf of the Cotton-spinners and
Weavers. In favour of an Eight Hours Law, 28,511 ; against it, 12,283.
The votes of the different trades, and a summarj^ of the Congress proceed-
ings on this subject, are given in The Eighl Hours Day, by Sidney Webb
and Harold Cox, 1891 ; see also H istory of the British Trades Union Congress,
by W. J. Davis, vol. ii. pp. 7-8.
392 The Old Unionism and the New
interference with the exceptional circumstances of the local
industry gradually developed into a general objection to
legal regulation of the hours of adult men. We find, there-
fore, the Northumberland and Durham miners from 1875
onwards ranging themselves more and more with the leaders
of the iron and building trades, who, as we have seen,
had become largely converted to the economic conceptions
then current among the middle class. The fact that the
Northumberland and Durham Associations, almost alone
among Miners' Unions, had successfully weathered the
bad times of 1877-79, and the constant presence of one or
other of their leaders on the Parliamentary Committee,
caused these opinions to be accepted as those of the whole
industry.
But the miners elsewhere did not long rest content with
the new policy of Durham and Northumberland. In
December 1881 the amalgamated South and West York-
shire Miners' Associations formally terminated the then
existing Shding Scale, and passed a resolution in favour of
the pohcy of restricting the output. During the following
years the Yorkshire employers several times proposed the
re-establishment of a scale, but the men insisted on its
being accompanied by an agreement for a minimum below
which wages should in no event fall — a condition to which
the coal-owners uniforml}^ refused their assent. The lead
given by the Yorkshire miners was quickly followed by
other districts, notably by Lancashire. In this county
Trade Unionism among the miners had, as we have seen,
gone to pieces in the bad years. Reorganisation in local
Unions came in 1881 ; and a Lancashire Miners' Federation
was successfully established in the following year. At their
Conference of 1883 the delegates of the Lancashire miners
resolved, " That the time has come when the working miners
shall regulate the production of coal ; that no collier or
other underground worker shall work more than five days
or shifts per week ; and that the hours from bank to bank
be eight per shift." Finding it impossible to secure their
Discord among the Miners 393
object by strikes, the Lancashire men turned to that pohcy
of legislative regulation which had marked the proceedings
of the Conference of 1863.
With the improvement in trade which began in 1885,
the membership and influence of the Lancashire and York-
shire organisations rapidly increased, and new federations
were started throughout the Midlands. The Scotch miners,
too, had in 1886-87 ^ short outburst of organisation, when
a national federation was formed with a membership of
23,000. All these Associations adopted the policy of regu-
lating the output, and the Scotch miners, in particular,
conducted, in 1887, a vigorous agitation in support of the
clause limiting the day's work to eight hours, which two
Scottish members endeavoured to insert in the Mines Regu-
lation Act of 1887.1 But the Executive of the National
Union had, since Macdonald's death in 1881, fallen entirely
into the hands of the Northumberland and Durham leaders.
Under their influence it maintained its adherence to the
principle of the Sliding Scale and its hostility to the Eight
Hours Bill, thereby alienating, not only the new federations,
but also the old-established and powerful Yorkshire Miners'
Association. From 1885 to 1888 the battle between the
contending doctrines ranged at every miners' conference. ^
During the latter year the combatants withdrew to separate
camps. In September 1888 a conference of the representa-
tives of non-sliding scale districts was called together in
^ The clause was moved by S. Williamson, Liberal Member for Kil-
marnock, and seconded by J. H. C. Hozier, Conservative Member for
South Lanarkshire. It received no support from the " Labour Members,"
and was rejected by 159 to 104. See the Eight Hours Day, by Webb and
Cox, 1891, p. 23.
" The " National Conferences " of the miners are a feature peculiar to
the industry. Besides the periodical gatherings of the separate federations,
the miners, since 1863, have had frequent conferences of delegates from all
the organised districts in the kingdom. These conferences were, until
1889, held under the auspices of the National Union ; subsequently they
were summoned by the Miners' Federation. The meetings, from which
reporters are now excluded, are consultative only, and their decisions are
not authoritative until adopted by the separate organisations. See Die
Ordnung des Arbeitsverhdltnisses in den Kohlengruben von Northumberland
und Durham, by Dr. Emil Auerbach (Leipzig, 1890, 268 pp.).
• O 2
J94 The Old Unionism and the New
Manchester, when arrangements were made for the estabhsh-
ment of a new federation, into which no district governed
by a sUding scale was to be allowed to enter. From this
time* forth tlie old National Union on the one hand, and
the new Miners' Federation on the other, became rivals for
the allegiance of the various district associations, and some-
what unsympathetic critics of each other's policy and actions.
The issue was not long doubtful. The National Union
gradually shrank up to Northumberland and Durham,
whilst the Miners' Federation, with its aggressive policy
and its semi-Socialistic principles of a minimum wage and
a legal day, grew apace. From 36,000 members in 1888, it
rose to 96,000 in 1889, 147,000 in 1891, and over 200,000 in
1893, overshadowing in its growth all existing Trade Union
organisations. The Socialist advocates of the legal limita-
tion of the hours of labour accordingly enjoyed from 1888
onward, both in the Trade, Union Congress and at the polling-
booths, the support of a rapidly growing contingent of
organised miners, whose solid adhesion has done more than
anything else to promote the general movement in favour
of an Eight Hours Bill.
It is easy at this distance to recognise, in the altered
tone of the rank and file of Congress delegates, a reflection
of the wider change of opinion outside. But to the Trade
Union Front Bench, as, in fact, to most of the politicians
of the time, it was incredible that the new ideas should gain
any real footing among the skilled artisans. The Parli.i-
mentary Committee regarded the innovations with much
the same feeling as that with which they had met the pro-
posals of a little gang which had, in 1882, vainly attempted
to foist the principles of fiscal protection upon the Con-
gress.^ When Congress insisted on passing a resolution
with which the Parliamentary Committee found themselves
^ The " Fair Trade " att.'u:k had arisen in the following manner. At
the Bristol C()n.g;ress in 1878, certain delegates, who were strongly suspectotl
of being the paid agents of the organisation then agitating for the abolition
of the foreign bounties on sugar, attempted to force this question upon
the Congress, and made a serious disturbance. These delegates afterwards
The Parliamentary Committee 395
in disagreement, this expression of opinion was sometimes
ignored as being nothing more than the fad of particular
delegates. It was in vain that the Congress of 1888, after
ten years' deliberation, definitely decided in favour of the
principles of Land Nationalisation instead of Peasant Pro-
prietorship. The Parliamentary Committee contented itself
with promising that " a well-considered measure " would be
put forward by the Committee. The Eight Hours question
could not be treated so cavaherly. Direct resolutions in favour
of legislative action were therefore staved off by proposals
for inquiry. When a vote of the Trade Union world was
decided upon, the Parliamentary Committee, in conjunction
with many of the General Secretaries, were able practically
to baulk the investigation. The voting paper was loaded
with warnings and arguments against legislative action.
No attempt was made to ensure a genuine vote of the rank
and file. In some cases the Executive Committees were
allowed to take upon themselves the responsibility of de-
claring the opinions held by the members of their societies,
the total membership of which was then reckoned in the
voting. In other instances the Executives were permitted
without remonstrance simply to burke the question. The
became the paid representatives of the " Fair Trade League," an associa-
tion avowedly composed of landlords and capitalists with the object of
securing a reimposition of import duties. The Front Bench steadfastly
refused to allow the Congress to be used for promotion of this object, and
were exposed in return to what the Congress in 18S2 declared to be." a
cowardly, false, and slanderous attack, ... an attempt at moral assassina-
tion." Instead of fighting the question of Free Trade versus Protection,
the emissaries of the Fair Trade League developed an elaborate system of
personal defamation, directed against Broadhurst, Howell, Shipton, and
other leaders. For instance, Broadhurst's administration of the Gas
Stokers' Rehef Fund in 1872 was made the pretext for vague insinuations
of malversation which were scattered broadcast through the Trade Union
world. At the Congress of 1881 the " Fair Trade " delegates were expelled,
on it being proved that their expenses were not paid by the Trade Union
organisations which they nominally represented. A renewed attack on
the Congress of 1882 ended in the triumphant victory of the Parliamentarv
Committee, the complete exoneration of Broadhurst and his colleagues, and
the final discomfiture of the " Fair Trade " delegates. See Henry Broad-
hurst : the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901 ; History of the British Trades
Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
396 The Old Unionism and the New
iiKiuiry failed to elicit any trustworthy census of the opinion
of the Trade Union world.
An equal lack of sympathy was shown in connection
with the growing feeling of the Congress in favour of the
participation of British Trade Unionists in International
Congresses. At the express command of Congress, the
Parliamentary Committee sent delegates to the International
gatherings of 1883 and 1886. But though these instructions
were complied with, the Parliamentary Committee made it
clear, in their annual reports, that far from favouring
International action, " the position they assumed was that
they were so well organised, so far aliead of foreign work-
men, that little could be done until these were more on a
level " with the skilled workers of England,^ The Congress
of 1886 nevertheless instructed the Parliamentary Committee
to summon an International Conference in London in the
following year. Instead of complying with this instruction,
the Committee pubhshed, in May 1887, a lengthy pamphlet
explaining that, owing to the indisposition of foreign work-
men to make any pecuniary sacrifices for their Trade Unions,
and the consequent lack of any stable working-class organisa-
tions, they had decided to refer the whole question again
to the forthcoming Trade Union Congress. WTien the Con-
gress met at Swansea in September 1887, it soon became
evident that the Parliamentary Committee, on this question
a« on others, was quite out of touch with its constituents.
In spite of the influence of the Front Bench, a resolution in
favour of an International Congress was adopted ; and the
Committee succeeded only in induciijig Congress to impose
restrictions which were intended to exclude the delegates
of the German Social-Democratic party. The International
Congress was held in London in November 1888. Not-
withstanding every precaution, a majority of the repre-
sentatives proved to be of Socialist views, Mrs. Besant,
John Bums, Tom Mann, and Kcir Hardie appearing among
' Report to Congress of 1884. This is another insttince of the aban
donment of the more generous views of Applegarth and Odger.
Lack of Leadership 397
the British delegates. The stiff and unsympathetic atti-
tude of the Parhamentary Committee led to heated and,
at times, unseemly controversies ; and the resolutions
passed were treated by the Committee as of no account
whatsoever.
The net result of these proceedings was the loss by the
Parhamentary Committee of all intellectual leadership of
the Trade Union world. They failed either to resist the
new ideas or to guide them into practicable channels. The
official Trade Union programme from 1885 to 1889 became
steadily more colourless, in striking contrast with the rapid
march of politics in the country, which was sweeping the
Liberal party forward year by year until in 1891 it adopted
the so-called " Newcastle Programme." This programme
formulated, though very inadequately, the national side of
that semi-coUectivist pohcy which under the name of Pro-
gressivism had superseded Liberalism in the London County
Council. All that the Parliamentary Committee did was to
abandon, one by one, the proposals for the democratisation
of the civil and judicial administration which the Front
Bench had so much at heart, without replacing them by
the more robust resolutions which the Congress in these
years was passing. The Land Question, on which a vigorous
advocacy of the creation of small freeholders had been
formerly maintained, dwindled to a meaningless demand for
undefined reform of the land laws, and finally disappeared
altogether on the adoption by the Congress of the principle
of nationalisation. The maintenance of the Nine Hours
Day, and the further reduction of the hours of labour by
means of voluntary combination (a frequent item in the
official agenda from 1875 to 1879) gradually dropped out
altogether as the new demaild for legal regulation gathered
strength. In short, the Parliamentary Committee had per-
force to give up those items in their programme which were
contrary to the new ideas of Congress, whilst they silently
abstained from incorporating the new resolutions with which
they were personally not in agreement.
398 The Old Unionism and the New
It would, however, be unfair to assume that the stock
of official Trade Unionism was, during these years, absolutely
barren of new developments. To Mr. C. J. Drummond,^
then Secretary to the London Society of Compositors, and
a friend of the Parliamentary Committee, belongs the credit
of having taken the first step towards the enforcement,
through the Government, of a standard minimum wage.
On the revision of the Government printing contract in
1884, Mr. Drummond secured the support of the Parlia-
mentary Committee in an attempt to induce the Stationery
Office to adopt, as the basis for the contract, the Trade
Union rates of the London compositors. This attempt
was, in the main, successful ; but the new contract was
nevertheless given to a " closed " house, in which no member
of the Union could work. The compositors did not let the
matter rest. When the President of the Local Government
Board (Joseph Chamberlain) issued a circular in January
1886, as to the effects of the depression in trade, Mr. Drum-
mond replied by explicitly demanding the Government's
recognition of the Standard Wage in all their dealings. The
idea spread with great rapidity. A general demand was
started that public authorities should present a good example
as employers of labour by themselves paying Trade Union
rates, and insisting on their contractors doing the same.
Candidates for Parliament at the General Election of 1886
found themselves, at the instance of the London Society of
Compositors,^ for the first time " heckled " as to their will-
ingness to insist on " Fair Wages " ; and it began slowly
to dawn upon election agents that it might be prejudicial
for their election hterature to bear the imprint of " rat
houses." In October 1886 the action of the London School
Board in giving its printing contract to an " unfair " house
was bitterly resented by the London compositors, who in-
^ Mr. DrunimoiKl, who resigned his secretaryship in 1892, was in Ihe
following year appointed to the staff of the Labour Department of the
Board of Trade, from which he retired in 1918.
'^ See its Circular of June 1886.
The " Fair Wage Clause " . 399
duced the London Trades Council to go on a vain deputation
of protest. WTien, in November 1888, the London School
Board election came round, A. G. Cook, a member of the
London Society of Compositors, secured election for Fins-
bury, avowedly as a champion of Trade Union wages ; and
two members of the Fabian Society, ]\Irs. Annie Besant and
the Rev. Stewart Headlam, won seats as Socialists. By
their eloquence and tactical skill these members induced
the Board, earty in 1889, to declare that it would henceforth
insist on the payment of " Fair Wages " by all its contractors,
a policy in which the Board was promptly followed by the
newly established London County Council.^ This new de-
parture by the leading public bodies in the Metropolis did
much to bring about a common understanding between the
official Trade Unionists and the new movement. It is
needless to describe in this place how, since that date, the
principle of " Fair Wages " has developed. By 1894 a
hundred and fifty local authorities had adopted some kind
of " Fair Wages " resolution. In 1890, and more exphcitly
still in 1893, successive Governments found it necessary to
repudiate the old principle of buying in the cheapest market,
in favour of the now widespread feeling that public author-
ities as large employers of labour, instead of ignoring the
condition of their employees, should use their influence to
maintain the Standard Rate of Wages and Standard Hours
of Labour recognised and in practice obtained by the Trade
Unions concerned.
Though the Front Bench as a whole maintained during
these years its poUcy of contemptuous inactivity, there were,
as we have seen, some signs of the permeation of the new
ideas. It was under these circumstances a grave misfortune
^ Some isolated protests against the employment of non-Unionists are
of earlier date. Thus, the minutes of the Birmingham Trades Council
show that, on July 3, 1880, at the instance of a painters' delegate, it passed
a resolution protesting against the employment of " non-Union and
incompetent men " by the local hospital. And in the same month the
Wolverhampton Trades Council had successfully protesited against the
employment of non-Unionist printers upon a new Liberal newspaper about
to be established.
400 The Old Unionism and the New
that the inevitable criticism on the ParUamentary Committee
began by a scurrilous attack upon the personal character
and conduct of its leaders.^ During the years 1887-89 the
conscientious adhesion to the Liberal party of most of the
Parliamentary Committee was made the occasion for gross
charges of personal corruption. The General Secretaries
of the great Unions, men who had for a lifetime diligently
served their constituents, found their influence undermined,
their character attacked, and themselves denounced, by the
circulation all over the country of insidious accusations of
treachery to the working classes. These charges found a
too ready acceptance among, and were repeated by, those
young and impatient recruits of the new movement who
knew nothing of the history and services of the men they
were attacking. In the year 1889 the friction reached its
climax. During the summer the attacks upon the personal
character of the Front Bench were redoubled. As the date
of the Trade Unioh Congress approached, it became known
that-a determined attempt would be made by the Socialist
delegates to oust the Parliamentary Committee from office.
The Congress met at Dundee, and plunged straight into an
angry conflict in which the Socialists were completely
routed. The regular attenders of the Congress had, as we
have seen, been gradually absorbing many of the new ideas,
and were not altogether satisfied with the way their resolu-
tions had been ignored by the Parliamentary Committee.
But all discontent or criticism was swept away by the anger
which the character of the attack liad excited. A great
majority of the delegates came expressly pledged to support
Broadhurst and his colleagues, and when the division was
taken only 11 out of a meeting of 188 delegates were found
^ The chief medium for tlie attack was the Labour Elector, a penny
weekly journal published, from September 1888 to April 1890, by .Mr.
H. H. Champion, an ex-officer of the Royal Artillerj', who (prosecuted in
1886, as we have seen, with H. M. Hyndnian, J. Burns, and Williams, for
sedition) had at one time been a leading member of the Social Democratic
Federation, from which he was excluded on a difference of policy. He
afterwards emigrated to Melbourne, where he still (1920) resides.
Broadhurst's Victory 401
to vote against him. The Cotton Operatives who had at
all times supported factory legislation, the Miners who were
demanding an Eight Hours Bill, the Londoners who came
from the centre of the Socialist agitation — all rallied to
defend the Parliamentary Committee. The little knot of
assailants were thoroughly discredited ; and the triumph of
the " old gang " was complete.^
The victory of the Parliamentary Corrimittee was hailed
with satisfaction by all who were alarmed at the progress
of the new ideas. For a moment it looked as if the organised
Trade Unions of skilled workers had definitely separated
themselves from the new labour movement growing up
around them. Such a separation would, in our opinion,
have been an almost irreparable disaster. The Trade
Union Congress could claim to represent less than 10 per
cent of the wage-earners of the country. Many of the
old societies were already shrinking up into insignificant
minorities of superior workmen, intent mainly on securing
their sick and superannuation benefits. Any definite
exclusion of wider ideals might easily have reduced the
whole Trade Union organisation to nothing more than a
somewhat stagnant department of the Friendly Societ}-
movement. This danger was averted by a series of dramatic
events which brought the new movement once more inside
the Trade Union ranks. At the moment that Henry Broad-
hurst was triumphing over his enemies at Dundee, the London
dock-labourers were marching to that brilhant victory over
their employers which changed the whole face of the Trade
Union world.
The great dock strike of 1889 was the culmination of
an attempt to organise the unskilled workers which had
begun in London two or three years before. The priva-
tions suffered by the unemployed labourers during the
years of depression of trade, and the new spirit of hope-
fulness due to the Socialist propaganda, had led to efforts
^ Henry Broadhiirst : the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901, pp. 218-24 '>
History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
402 The Old Unionism and the New
being made to bring the vast hordes of unskilled workmen
in the Metropolis into some kind of organisation. At first
this movement made very little progress. In July 1888,
however, the harsh treatment suffered by the women
employed in making lucifer matches roused the burning
indignation of Mrs. Besant, then editing Tlie Link, a little
weekly newspaper which had arisen out of the struggle for
Trafalgar Square. A fiery leading article had the unexpected
result of causing the match-girls to revolt ; and 672 of them
came out on strike. Without funds, without organisation,
the struggle seemed hopeless. But by the indefatigable
energy of Mrs. Besant and Herbert Burrows public opinion
was aroused in a manner never before witnessed ; £400
was subscribed by hundreds of sympathisers in all classes ;
and after a fortnight's obstinacy the employers were com-
pelled, by sheer pressure of pubhc feeling, to make some
concessions to their workers.
The match-girls' victory turned a new leaf in Trade
Union annals. Hitherto success had been in almost exact
proportion to the workers' strength. It was a new experi-
ence for the weak to succeed because of their very weakness,
by means of the intervention of the public. The lesson
was not lost on other classes of workers. The London gas-
stokers were being organised by Bums, Mann, and Tillett,
aided by William Thorne, himself a gas-worker and a man
of sterling integrity and capacity. The Gas-workers and
General Labourers' Union, established in May 1889, quickly
enrolled many thousands of members, who in the first days
of August simultaneously demanded a reduction of their
hours of labour from twelve to eight per day. After an
interval of acute suspense, during which the directors of
the three great London gas companies measured their forces,
peaceful counsels prevailed, and the Eight Hours Day, to
the general surprise of the men no less than that of the
public, was conceded without a struggle, and was even
accompanied by a slight increase of the week's wages. ^
* The nit-n employed by two of the gas companies in London, and
The London Dockers 403
The success of such unorganised and unskilled workers
as the Match-makers and the Gas-stokers led to renewed
efforts to bring the great army of Dock-labourers into the
ranks of Trade Unionism. For two years past the promi-
nent London Socialists had journeyed to the dock gates in
the early hours of the morning to preach organised revolt
to the crowds of casuals struggling for work. Meanwhile
Benjamin Tillett, then working as a labourer in the tea
warehouses, was spending his strength in the apparently-
hopeless task of constituting the Tea-workers and General
Labourers' Union. The membership of this society fluc-
tuated between 300 and 2500 members ; it had practically
no funds ; and its very existence seemed precarious.
Suddenly the organisation received a new impulse. An
insignificant dispute on the 12th of August 1889 as to the
amount of " plus " (or bonus earned over and above tlire five-
pence per hour) on a certain cargo, brought on an impulsive
strike of the labourers at the South- West India Dock. The
men demanded sixpence an hour, the abohtion of sub-
contract and piecework, extra pay for overtime, and a
minimum engagement of four hours. Tillett called to his
aid his friends Tom Mann and John Burns, and appealed to
the whole body of dock labourers to take up the fight.
The strike spread rapidly to all the docks north of the
Thames. Within three days ten thousand labourers had,
with one accord, left the precarious and ill-paid work to
get which they had, morning after morning, fought at the
dock gates. The two powerful Unions of Stevedores (the
better-paid, trained workmen who load ships for export)
cast in their lot with the dockers, and in the course of the
most of those engaged by provincial municipalities, have retained this
boon. But in December 1889 the South Metropolitan Gas Company
insisted, after a serious strike, on a return to the twelve hours' shift. A
scheme of profit-sharing was used to break up their men's Union and induce
them to accept individual engagements inconsistent with Collective
Bargaining. This example (which is not unique) confirmed the Trade
Unions in their objection to schemes of " Profit-sharing " or " Co-partner-
ship."
404 The Old Unionism and the New
next week practically all the river-side labour had joined
the strike. Under the magnetic influence of John Burns,
who suddenly became famous as a labour leader on both
sides of the globe, the traffic of the world's greatest port
was, for over four weeks, completely paralysed. An electric
spark of sympathy with the poor dockers fired the enthusiasm
of all classes of the community. Public disapproval hindered
the dock companies from obtaining, even for their unskilled
labour, sufficient blacklegs to take the strikers' place. A
public subscription of £48,736 allowed Burns to organise an
elaborate system of strike-pay, which not only maintained
the honest docker, but also bribed every East End loafer
to withhold his labour ; and finally the concentrated pressure
of editors, clergymen, shareholders, ship-owners, and mer-
chants enabled Cardinal Manning and Sydney (afterwards
Lord) Buxton, as self-appointed mediators, to compel the
Dock Directors to concede practically the whole of the men's
demands, a delay of six weeks being granted to allow the
new arrangements to be made. As in the case of the match-
girls in the previous year, the most remarkable feature of
the dockers' strike was the almost universal sympathy with
the workers' demands. A practical manifestation of that
sympathy was given by the workmen of Australia. The
Australian newspapers pubhshed telegraphic accounts of
the conflict, with descriptions of the dockers' WTongs, which
produced an unparalleled and unexpected result. Public
subscriptions in aid of the London dockers were opened in
all the principal towns on the AustraUan continent ; and
money poured in from all sides. Over £30,000 was remitted
to London by telegraph — an absolutely unique contribu-
tion towards the strike subsidy which went far to win the
victory ultimately achieved.'
^ This strike had the good fortune to find contemporary historians who
were themselves concerned in all the phases of the struggle. The Story of
the Dockers' Strike, by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Hubert Llewellyn Smith and
Vaughan Nash (1890, 190 pp.), gives not only a detailed chronicle of the
highly dramatic proceedings, but also a useful description of the organisa-
tion of the London Docks.
Organisation of the Labourers 405
The immediate result of the dockers' success was the
formation of a large number of Trade Unions among the
unskilled labourers. Branches of the Dock, Wharf, and
Riverside Labourers' Union (into which Tillett's little society
was now transformed) were estabhshed at all the principal
ports. A rival societ}^ of dockers, established at Liverpool,
enrolled thousands of members at Glasgow and Belfast.
The unskilled labourers in Newcastle joined the Tyneside
and National Labour Union, which soon extended to all the
neighbouring towns. The Gas- workers' Union enrolled tens
of thousands of labourers of all kinds in the provincial cities.
Organisation began again among the farm labourers. The
National Union of Agricultural Labourers, which had sunk
to a few thousand scattered members, suddenly rose in 1890
to over 14,000. New societies arose, which took in general
as well as farm labourers ; such as the Eastern Counties
LajDOur Federation, which, by 1892, had 17,000 members ;
and the smaller societies centring respectively on Norwich,
Devizes, Reading, Hitchin, Ipswich, and Kingsland in Here-
fordshire.^ The General Railway Workers' Union, origin-
ally established in 1889 as a rival to the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, took in great numbers of general
labourers. The National Amalgamated Sailors and Fire-
men's Union,^ estabhshed in 1887, expanded during 1889 to
^ This movement was much assisted by the " Red Van " campaigns
of the EngHsh Land Restoration League, 1891-94, which coupled Land
NationaUsation propaganda with the formation of local unions of the
labourers in the Southern and Midland Counties of England. In the
agricultural depression of 1894-95, when staffs were further reduced and
wages again lowered, nearly all these new Unions sank to next to nothing,
or entirely dissolved. I\Iost information as to them is to be gained from
The Church Reformer for 1 89 1-95 ; History of the EngHsh Agricultural
Labourer, by W. Hasbach, 1907 ; and Ernest Selley's Village Trade Unions
of Two Centuries, 1919.
2 Short-lived and turbulent combinations among seamen have existed
at various periods for the past hundred years, notably between 1810 and
1825, on the north-east coast, where many sailors' benefit clubs were also
estabhshed. In 1851, again, a widespread national organisation of seamen
is said to have existed, having twenty-five branches between Peterhead and
London, and numbering 30,000 members. This appears to have been a loose
federation of practically autonomous port Unions, which for some years
4o6 The Old Unionism and the New
a mcmbersliip of 65,000. Within a year after the dockers'
victor}^ probably over 200,000 workers had been added to
the Trade Union ranks, recruited from sections of the labour
world formerly abandoned as incapable of organisation.
All these societies were marked by low contributions and
comprehensive membership. They were, at the outset,
essentially, if not exclusively, devoted to trade protection,
and were largely political in their aims. Their character-
istic spirit is aptly expressed by the resolution of the Con-
gress of the General Railway Workers' Union on the 19th
of November 1890 : " That the Union shall remain a fighting
one, and shall not be encumbered with any sick or accident
fund." " We have at present," reports the General Secre-
tary of the National Union of Gas- workers and General
Labourers in November 1889, " one of the strongest labour
Unions in England. It is true we have only one benefit
attached, and that is strike pay. I do not believe in having
sick pay, out-of-work pay, and a number of other pays.
. . . The whole aim and intention of this Union is to reduce
the hours of labour and reduce Sunday work." ^
A wave of Trade Unionism, comparable in extent with
those of 1833-34 3^rid 1873-74, was now spreading into every
corner of British industry. Already in 1888 the revival of
trade has led to a marked increase in Trade Union member-
ship. This normal growth now received a great impulse
from the sensational events of the Dock strike. Even the
kept up a vigorous agitation against obnoxious clauses in the Merchant
Shipping Acts of 1851-54, and fought the sailors' grievances in the law-
courts. In 1879 the existing North of England Sailors and Sea-going
Firemen's Friendly Association was established, but failed to maintain
itself outside Sunderland. In 1887 its most vigorous member, J. Havelock
Wilson, convinced that nothing but a national organisation would be
effective, started the National Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen's Union,
which his able and pertinacious " lobbying " made, for some years, an
effective Parliamentary force.
^ Address to members in First Half- Yearly Report (London, 1889).
The spirit of the uprising is well given in The New Trade Uniouism, by
Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, 1S90; on which George Shipton was moved
to write A Reply to Messrs. Tom Mann and Ben Tillett's Pamphlet
entitled "The New Trade Unionism," 1890.
Trade Union Growth 407
oldest and most aristocratic Unions were affected by the
revivalist fervour of the new leaders. The eleven principal
societies in the shipbuilding and metal trades, which had
been, since 1885, on the decline, increased from 115,000 at the
end of 1888 to 130,000 in 1889, 145,000 in 1890, and 155,000
in 1891. The ten largest Unions in the building trades,
which between 1885 and 1888 had, in the aggregate, likewise
decHned in numbers, rose from 57,000 in 1888 to 63,000 ih
1889, 80,000 in 1890, and 94,000 in 1891. In certain indivi-
dual societies the increase in membership during these years
was unparalleled in their history. We have already referred
to the rapid rise between 1888 and 1891 of that modern
Colossus of Unions, the Miners' Federation. The Operative
Society of Bricklayers, estabHshed in 1848, grew from a
fairly stationary 7000 in 1888, to over 17,000 in 1891. The
National Society of Boot and Shoe Operatives, established
in 1874, went from 11,000 in 1888 to 30,000 in 1891. And,
to turn to quite a different industry, the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants, a trade friendly societ}^ of the
old type, established in 1872, rose from 12,000 in 1888 to
30,000 in 1891. Nor was the expansion confined to a mere
increase in membership. New Trades Councils sprang up
in all directions, whilst those already existing were rejoined
by the trades which had left them. Federations of the
Unions in kindred trades were set on foot, and competing
societies in the same trade sank their- rivalry in the formation
of local joint committees. — "
The victory of the London Dockers and the impetus \j
it gave to Trade Unionism throughout the country at last
opened the eyes of the Trade Union world to the signifi-
cance of the new movement. It was no longer possible
for the Parliamentary Committee to denounce the Socialists
as a set of outside intriguers, when Burns and Mann, now
become the representative working-men Socialists, stood at
the head of a body of 200,000 hitherto unorganised workmen.
The general secretaries of the older Unions, forming a com-
pact official party behind the Front Bench, were veering
4o8 The Old Unionism and the New
around towards the advanced party. Their constituencies
were becoming permeated with SociaHsm. In many instances
the older members now supported the new faith. In other
cases they found themselves submerged by the large acces-
sions to their membership which, as we have already seen,
resulted from the general expansion. The process of con-
version was facilitated by the genuine admiration felt by
the whole Trade Union world for the great organising
power and generalship shown by the leaders of the new
movement, and by the cessation of the personal abuse and
recrimination which had hitherto marred the controversy.
At the Dundee Congress of 1889, as we have seen, Henry
Broadhurst, and his colleagues on the Parliamentary Com-
mittee, had triumphed all along the line. Within a year the
situation had entirely changed. The Stonemasons, Broad-
hurst's own society, had decided, by a vote of the members,
to support an Eight Hours Bill, and Broadhurst, under these
circumstances, had perforce to refuse to act as their repre-
sentative. The Executive Council of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers chose Burns and Mann as two out of
their five delegates, impressing upon them all a recom-
mendation to vote for the legal limitation of the hours of
labour. Both the old-establislied societies of Carpenters
gave a similar mandate. The Miners' Federation this time
led the attack on the old Front Bench, and the resolution
in favour of a general Eight Hours Bill was carried, after
a heated debate, by 193 to 155. Broadhurst resigned his
position as Secretary' of the Parliamentary Committee on the
ground of ill-health. George Shipton, the secretary of the
London Trades Council, publicly declared his conversion to
the legal regulation of the hours of labour. The Liverpool
Congress was as decisive a victory for the Socialists as that
of Dundee had been for the Parliamentary Committee.
The delegates passed in all sixty resolutions. "Out of
these sixty resolutions," said John Burns, " forty-five were
nothing more or less than direct appeals to the State and
Municipalities of this country to do for the workman wliat
H. M. Hyndman 409
Trade Unionism, ' Old ' and ' New,' has proved itself incap-
able of doing. Forty-five out of the sixty resolutions were
asking for State or Municipal interference on behalf of the
weak against the strong. ' Old ' Trade Unionists, from
Lancashire, Northumberland, and Birmingham, asked for
as many of these resolutions as the delegates from London ;
but it is a remarkable and significant fact that 19 out of
20 delegates were in favour of the ' New ' Trades Union
ideas of State interferences in all things except reduction
of hours, and even on this we secured a majority that
certainly entitles us SociaHsts to be jubilant at our success." ^
But whilst the new faith was being adopted by the rank
and file of Trade Unionists the character of the Socialist
propaganda had been undergoing an equal transformation.
The foremost representative of the CoUectivist views had
hitherto been the Social-Democratic Federation, of which
Burns and Mann were active members. Under the domi-
nant influence of Mr. H. M. H\Tidman, this association
adopted the economic basis and pohtical organisation of
State Socialism. Yet we find, along with these modem
views, a distinct recrudescence of the characteristic projects
of the revolutionary Owenism of 1833-34. The student of
the volumes of Justice between 1884 and 1889 will be struck
by the unconscious resemblance of many of the ideas and
much of the phraseology of its contributors, to those of the
Poor Man's Guardian and the Pioneer of 1834. ^^ do not
here allude to the revival, m 1885, of the old demand for
an Eight Hours Bill, a measure regarded on both occasions
as a " mere palliative." Nor need we refer to the constant
assumption, made alike b\' Robert Owen and the Social-
Democratic lecturers, that the acceptance of the Labour-
value theory would enable the difficulty of the " unem-
ploj^ed " to be solved by organising the mutual exchange of
their unmarketable products. But both in Justice and the
Pioneer we see the same disbelief in separate action by
^ speech delivered by John Burns on the Liverpool Congress, September
21, i8go (1890, 32 pp.).
41U i'lie Old Unionism and the A't'U'
particular Trade Unions, in contrast to an organisation
including " every trade, skilled and unskilled, of every
nationality under the sun." ' " The real emancipation of
labour," says the official manifesto of the Social-Democratic
Federation to the Trade Unions of Great Britain in Sep-
tember 1884, " can only be effected by the solemn banding
together of millions of human beings in a federation as wide
as the civilised world." '^ " The day has gone by," we read
in 1887, " for the efforts of isolated trades. . . . Nothing is
to bo gained for the workers as a class without the complete
organisation of labourers of all grades, skilled and unskilled.
. . . We appeal therefore earnestly to the skilled artisans
of all trades. Unionists and non-Unionists ahke, to make
common cause with their unskilled brethren, and with us
Social-Democrats, so that the workers may themselves take
hold of the means of production, and organise a Co-operative
Commonwealth for themselves and their children." ^ And
if the " scientific Socialists " of 1885 were logically pledged
to the administration of industry by the officials of the com-
munity at large, none the less do we see constantly cropping
up, especially among the working-class members, Owen's
diametrically opposite proposal that the workers must
" own their own factories and decide by vote who their
managers and foremen shall be." * Above all we see the
same faith in the near and inevitable advent of a sudden
revolution, when " it will only need a compact minority
to take advantage of some opportune accident that will
surelv come, to overthrow the present system, and once and
for all lift the toilers from the present social degradation." ^
" NobU Robert Owen," says Mr. Hyndman in 18S5," seventy
years ago perceived ' the utter impossibilit\' of succeeding
• Jusliif. Novfinbcr 7, 18.S5.
• Printed in Justice, Scplcml>cr f>, 1884.
• " The Decay of Trade Unions," by H. M Mvndman. Justice, Juno 18.
1887. *•
• " Thf Trade Union Congress," by Jcihn Hums, Justice, SeptcmlnT 12,
1885.
' justice, July 11, 1885.
18^4 '^^^^ i88g (^411
in permanently improving the condition of our population
by any half-measures,' We see the same truth if possible
5''et more clearly now. But the revolution which in his day
was unprepared is now ripe and ready. . . . Nothing short
of a revolution which shall place the producers of wealth
in control of their own country can possibly change matters
for the better. . . . Will it be peaceful ? We hope it may.
That does not depend upon us. But, peaceful or violent,
the great social revolution of the nineteenth century is at
hand, and if fighting should be necessary the workers may
at least remember the profound historical truth that ' Force
is the midwife of progress delivering the old society pregnant
with the new,' and reflect that they are striving for the
final overthrow of a tyranny more degrading than the worst
chattel slavery of ancient times." ^ " Let our mission be,"
he writes in 1887, " to help to band together the workers of
the world for the great class struggle against their exploiters.
No better date could be chosen for the estabUshment of such
international action on a sound basis than the year 1889,
which the classes look forward to with trembling and the
masses with hope. I advocate no hasty outbreak, no
premature and violent attempt on the part of the people
to realise the full Social-Democratic programme. But I do
say that from this time onwards we, as the Social-Demo-
cratic Labour Party of Great Britain, should make every
effort to bear our part in the celebration by the international
proletariat of the First Centenary of the great French
Revolution, and thus to prepare for a complete International'
Social Revolution before the end of the century." ^
The year 1889, instead of ushering in a " complete"
International Social Revolution " by a universal compact
of the workers, turned the current of Socialist propaganda
from revolutionary to constitutional channels. The advent
^ Justice, July 18, 1885. The identity of purpose and methods between
the two movements is indeed elsewhere directly asserted ; see " Socialism
in '34," ibid., April 19, 1884, and the extracts from the Owenite journals
in the issue for July 25, 1885.
2 Ibid., August 6, 1887.
412 The Old Unionism and the New
of political Democracy had put out of date the project of
" a combined assault by workers of every trade and grade
against the murderous monopoly of the minority." ^ For
a moment, at the very crisis of the dockers' struggle, the
idea of a " General Strike " flickers up, only to be quickly
abandoned as impracticable. When the problems of admin-
istration had actually to be faced by the new leaders the
specially Owenite characteristics of the Socialist propaganda
were quietly dropped. In January 1889 John Burns was
elected a member of the London County Council, and
-^ quickly found himself organising the beginnings of a bureau-
cratic municipal Collectivism, as far removed from Owen's
" national companies " as from the conceptions of the
Manchester School. Tom Mann, as president of the Dockers'
Union, could not help discovering how impracticable it was
to set to work his unemployed members, accustomed only
to general labour, in the production for mutual exxhange
of the bread and clothing of which they were in need. And
whether working in municipal committees, or at the head
office of a great Union, both Burns and Mann had perforce
^ to realise the impossibility of bringing about any sudden
or simultaneous change in the social or industrial organisa-
tion of the whole community, or even of one town or trade.
Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising
that Burns and Mann left the Social Democratic Federa-
tion, and found themselves hotly denounced by their old
comrades. 2 With the defection of the New Unionists,
•revolutionary Socialism ceased to grow ; and the rival pro-
paganda of constitutional action became the characteristic
feature of the British Socialist Movement. Far from abusing
or deprecating Trade Unionism or Co-operation, the con-
stitutional Collectivists urged it as a primary duty upon
' Justice. July 25, 1885.
2 From 1889 onwards the columns of Justice abound in abuse and
denunciation of the leaders of the New l^nionism. We may cite, not so
much because it summarises this denunciation and abuse, but because of
the details of the movement that it incidentally gives, The Rise and Pro-
gress of a Right Honourable, by Joseph Burgess (191 1).
Municipal Socialism 413
every working-class Socialist to become a member of his
Trade Union, to belong to the local Co-operative Society,
and generally to take as active a part as possible in all
organisations. Instead of denouncing partial reforms as
mischievous attempts to defeat " the Social Revolution,"
the New Unionist leaders appealed to their followers to put
their own representatives on Town Councils, and generallyc^
to use their electoral influence to bring about, in a regular
and constitutional manner, the particular changes they had
at heart. Instead of circulating calumnies against the per-
sonal character of Trade Union leaders, they flooded the
Trade Union world with Socialist hterature, dealing not so
much in rhetorical appeals or Utopian aspirations as in
economic expositions of the actual grievances of industrial cs-
life. The vague resolutions of the Trades Union Congresses
were worked out in practical detail, or even embodied in
draft bills which the local member of ParHament might be
invited to introduce, or driven to support.
The new policy, adopted as it was by such prominent
Socialists as Burns, Mann, and Tillett, and Mrs. Besant,
appeared, from 1889 onward, increasingly justified by its
success. The Collectivist victories on the London School
Board and County Council, the steady growth of municipal
activity, and the increasing influence exercised by working-
men members of representative bodies, went far to persuade
both SociaUsts and Trade Unionists that the only practicable
means of securing for the community the ownership and
control of the means of production lay in a wide extension
of that national and municipal organisation of public services
towards which Parliament and the Town Councils had
already taken the first steps. In those industries in which
neither national nor municipal administration was yet pos-
sible, the Socialists demanded such a regulation of the con-
ditions of employment as would ensure to every worker a
minimum Standard of Life. The extension of the Factory
Acts and the more thorough administration of the Sanitary
Law accordingly received a new impulse. In another direc-
414 ^^'^ ^f'd Unionism and the New,
tion the drastic taxation of Rent and Interest, pressed for
by Land Nationalisers and Socialists alike, was justified
as leading eventually to the collective absorption of all
unearned incomes. In short, from 1889 onward, the chief
efforts of the British Socialist Movement have been directed,
not to bringing about any sudden, complete, or simultaneous
revolution, but to impregnating all the existing forces of
"^society with Collectivist ideals and Collectivist principles.^
With the advent of the " New Unionism " of 1889-90
we close this chapter. We shall see, in subsequent chapters
to what extent, and in what way, the Trade Union Move-
ment was permanently affected by the new movement.
But we append at this point a brief account of what seem
to us, first, the ephemeral features and, secondly, the more
durable results of an impulse which did not wholly spend
its force for a whole decade.
If we were to believe some of the more enthusiastic
apostles of the " New Unionism," we should imagine that
the aggressive trade society of unskilled labourers, un-
encumbered with friendly benefits, was an unprecedented
1 In this development some share is to be attributed to the work of
the Fabian Society, which, estabhshed in 1883, began in 1887 to exercise
a growing influence on working-class opini<m. The publication, in 1889,
of Fabian Essays in Socialism, the circulation between 1887 and 1893 of
three-quarters of a million copies of its scries of " Fabian tracts," and
the delivery of several thousand lectures a year in London and other
industrial centres, contributed largely to substitute a practical and
constitutional policy of Collectivist reform for the earlier revolutionary
propaganda. Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and other Trade Union leaders
were, from i88() onwards, among the members of the parent Fabian
Society, whilst tlic ninety independent local F"abian Societies in the pro-
vincial centres usually incluck"d many of the delegates to the local Trades
Councils. Some account of the Society and its work will be found in
Zum socialen Frieden, by Dr. von Schulze Gacvernitz (Leipzig, i8i>i,
2 vi>ls.) ; in Euglische Socialreforwer, by Dr. M. Crunwald (Leipzig. iSg;) ;
in La SociH6 Fabienne, by Edouard Pfeiflfor (Paris, iQii); in Geschuhte
des Socialismus in England, by M. Beer (Stuttgart. 191 3). republished in
different English form as History of British Socialism (vol. i., i«.)i8 ; vol. ii ,
1920) ; in Socialism, a Critical Analysis, by O. D. Skelton, 191 1 ; and in
Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day. b\-
Ernest Barker, 1915. A superficial survey of the development of opinion
is given in Socialism in England, by Sidney \V[ebb (ist edition, 1889; 2nd
edition. 1893). See History ojthe Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease (1915).
The Alternation of Type 415
departure in the history of labour organisation. Those who
have followed our history thus far will know better than to
entertain such an illusion, itself an old characteristic of
Trade Unionist re\dvals. The purely trade society is as old
as Trade Unionism itself. Throughout the whole history of
the movement we find two types of societies co-existing. At
special crises in the annals of Trade Unionism we see one
or other of these types taking the lead, and becoming the
" New Unionism " of that particular period. Both trade
society and friendly society with trade obj ects were common
in the eighteenth century. Legal persecution of trade com-
bination brought to the front the Union cloaked in the guise
of a benefit club ; and it jvas mainly for organisations of this
type that Place and Hume won the emancipation of 1824-
1825. Ill 1833-34 we find Place deploring as a mischievous
innovation the growth of the new " Trades Unions " without
friendh' benefits. Twent3' years later we see the leadership
reverting to the " new model " of an elaborate trade friendly
society which, for a whole generation, was vehemently
denounced by employers as a fraud on the provident work-
man. The " New Unionism " of 1852, described by so
friendly a critic as Professor Beesh^ as a novel departure,
became, in its turn, the " Old Unionism " of 1889, when the
more progressive spirits again plumed themselves on elimi-c^
nating from their brand-new organisations the enervating
influences of friendly benefits.
A closer examination of the facts shows that this almost
rhythmical alternation of type has been only apparent.
The impartial student will notice that whilst the purely
trade society has been persistently adhered to by certain
important industries, such as the Coal-miners and the
Cotton-spinners, other trades, like the Engineers and the
Iron-founders, have remained equally constant to the
trade friendly society ; whilst others, again, such as the
Compositors and the Carpenters, have passed backwards
and forwards from one model to the other. But besides
this adaptation of type to the circumstances of particular
4i6 The Old Unionism and the New
industries, we see also a preference for the purely trade
society on no higher ground than its cheapness. The high
contributions and levies paid by the Cotton-spinners to their
essentially trade society are as far beyond the means of
the Agricultural Labourer or the Docker as the weekly pre-
miums for superannuation, sick, and other benefits charged
to the Amalgamated Engineer. When, as in 1833-34,
^ 1872, and 1889, a wave of enthusiasm sweeps the unskilled
labourers into the Trade Union ranks, it is obviously necessary
to form, at any rate in the first instance, organisations which
make no greater tax upon their miserable earnings than a
penny or twopence per week. The apparent rh^lhm of
alternations between the two typQS of organisation is due,
therefore, not to any general abandonment of one for the
other, but to the accidental prominence, in certain crises of
Trade Union history, of the Unions belonging to particular
trades or classes of wage-earners. When, for instance, the
cotton-spinners, the builders, and the unskilled labourers of
1834 loomed large to Francis Place as a revolutionary force,
the purely trade society appeared to him to be the source
of all that was evil in Trade Unionism. When, in 1848-52,
the iron trades were conspiring against piecework and over-
time, it was especially the illicit combination of trade and
friendly society which attracted the attention of the public,
and called forth the denunciations of the capitalist class.
And when in 1889 the dockers were stopping the trade of
London, and the coal-miners and cotton-spinners . were
pressing upon both political parties their demands for
legislative interference, we see George Howell voicing the
opposition to exclusivelj'^ trade societies as dangerously
mihtant bodies.^
If the purely trade society is no new thing, still less is
the extension of Trade Unionism to the unskilled labourer
an unprecedented innovation. The enthusiasm which, in
1872, enrolled a hundred thousand agricultural labourers
in a few montlis, produced also numerous small societies
* Trade Unionism Old and New, 1891, passim.
The New Methods 417
of town labourers, some of which survived for years before
absorption into larger organisations. The London and
Counties Labour League, established as the Kent and Sussex
Agricultural and General Labourers' Union in 1872, has
maintained its existence down to the present day. The
expansion of 1852 led to the formation in Glasgow of a
Labourers' Society, which is reputed to have enrolled thou-
sands of members. But it is wdth the enthusiasm of 1833-34
that the movement of 1889-90 has in this respect the
greatest analogy. The almost instantaneous conversion to
Trade Unionism after the dock strike of tens of thousands
of the unskilled labourers of the towns recalls, indeed,
nothing so much as the rapid enrolment of recruits among
the poorest wage-earners by the emissaries of the Grand
National Consolidated Trades Union.
But however strongly the outward features of the wave
of 1889-90 may remind the student of those of 1833-34,
the characteristics peculiar to the new movement signifi-
cantly measure the extent of the advance, both in social
theory and social methods, made by the wage-earners in <i
the two intervening generations. Time and experience
alone will show how far the empirical Socialism of the
Trade Unionist of 1889, with its eclectic opportunism, its
preference for municipal collectivism, its cautious adapta-
tion of existing social structure, and its modest aspirations
to a gradually increasing participation of the workmen in
control, may safely be pronounced superior in practicability G-
to the revolutionary and universal Communism of Robert
Owen. In truth, the radical distinction between 1833-34
and 1889-90 is not a matter of the particular social theories
which inspired the outbursts. To the great majority of
the Trade Unionists the theories of the leaders at either date
did but embody a vague aspiration after a more equit-
able social .order. The practical difference — the difference
reflected in the character and temper of the men attracted
to the two movements, and of the attitude of the public
towards them — is the difference of method and immediate
P
4i8 The Old Unionism and the New
action. Robert Owen, as we have seen, despised and re-
jected political action, and strove to form a new voluntary
organisation which should supersede, almost instantaneously
and in some unexplained way, the whole industrial, political,
and social administration of the country. In this disdain
of all existing organisations, and the suddenness of the
complete " social revolution " wliich it contemplated, the
Owenism of 1833-34 found, as we have seen, an echo in much
of the Socialist propaganda of 1884-89. The leaders of the
_>New Unionists, on the contrary, sought to bring into the
ranks of existing organisations — the Trade Union, the
Municipality, or the State — great masses of unorganised
workers who had hitherto been either absolutely outside
the pale, or inert elements within it. They aimed, not at
f superseding existing social structures, but at capturing them
v. all in the interests of the wage-earners. Above all, they
^ sought to teach the great masses of undisciplined workers
how to apply their newly acquired political power so as
to obtain, in a perfectly constitutional manner, whatever
changes in legislation or administration they desired.
The difference in method between the " New Unionism "
of 1833-34 and that of 1889-90 may, we think, be ascribed
in the main to the difference between the circumstances
under which the movements arose. To Robert Owen,
whose path was blocked on the political line by the dis-
franchisement of five out of six of the adult male popula-
tion, open voting under intimidation, corrupt close corpora-
tions in the towns and a Whig oligarchy at the centre, the
idea of relying on the constitutional instrument of the polling-
booth must have appeared no less chimerical than his own
programme appears to-day. The New Unionists of 1889-90,
on the other hand, found ready for their use an extensive
and all-embracing Democratic social structure, which it was
impossible to destroy, and would have been foolish to
attempt to ignore. The efforts of two generations of
Radical Individualists and " Old Trade Unionists " had
placed the legislative power and civil administration of the
The "New Unionism" 419
country in the hands of a hierarchy of popularly elected
representative bodies. The great engine of taxation was,
for instance, now under the control of the wage-earning
voters instead of that of the land-owning class. The Home
Secretary and ' the factory inspector, the reUeving-officer
and the borough surveyor, could be employed to carry out
the behests of the workers instead of those of the capitahsts.
And thus it came about that the methods advocated by the
New Unionists of 1889-94 resemble, not those of the Owenites
of 1833-34, but much more the practical arts of political
warfare so successfully pursued by the Junta of 1867-75.
We shall see the change which had come over the English
working-class movement in the course of sixty years if we
compare the leaders of the two movements which we have
been contrasting. To Owen himself we may allow the
privilege of his genius, which did not prevent him from
being an extravagantly bad captain for a working-class
movement. But in his leading disciples ignorance of in-
dustrial conditions, contemptuous indifference to facts and
figures, and incapacity to measure, even in the smallest
actions, the relation between the means and the end, stand
in as marked contrast to the sober judgment of men Hke
John Burns as they did to the cautious shrewdness of Allan
and Applegarth. It would indeed be easy to find many
traits of personal hkeness between Burns and Mann on the
one hand, and Allan and Applegarth on the other. .High
personal character, scrupulous integrity, dignity or charm
of manner, marked all four alike, and the resemblance of
character is heightened by a noticeable resemblance in the
nature of their activity. The day's work of Tom Mann at
the head office of the Dockers' Union from 1889 to 1892,
and that of John Burns in the London County Council and
the lobby of the House of Commons from 1892 to 1906,
were close reproductions of Allan's activity at the general
office of his Engineers, and Applegarth's assiduous attend-
ance to Parliamentary Committees and Royal Commissions.
In short, the ways and means of the leaders of the " New
420 The Old Unionism and the New
Unionism " remind the student, not of the mystic rites and
skeleton mummery of the Owenite movement, but rather
of the restless energy and poHtical ingenuity of the Junta
or the Trades Union Congress Parhamentary Committee in
those early days when the old Trade Unionists were figliting
for legislative reforms with a faith which was as wise as it
was fervent and sincere.
Some of the secondary characteristics of the New Union-
ism of 1889 promptly faded away. The revulsion of feeling
against the combination of friendly benefits with Trade
Union purposes quickly disappeared, though the difficulty
of levying high contributions upon ill-paid workers prevented
the complete adoption of the contrary policy.^ The ex-
pansion of trade which began in 1889 proved to be but of
brief duration, and with the returning contraction of 1892
many of the advantages gained by the wage-earners were
lost. Under the influence of this check the unskilled
labourers once more largely fell away from the Trade
Union ranks. But just as 1873-74 left behind it a far more
permanent structure than 1833-34, so 1889-90 added even
more than 1873-74. The older Unions retained a large part,
at any rate, of the two hundred thousand members added
to their ranks between 1887 and 1891. But this numerical
accession was of less importance than what may, without
exaggeration, be termed the spiritual rebirth of organisa-
tions which were showing signs of decrepitude. The selfish
spirit of exclusiveness which often marked the relatively
^ "^ well-paid engineer, carpenter, or boilcrmaker of 1880-85,
(gave place to a more generous recognition of the essential
solidarity of the wage-earning class. For example, the whole
constitution of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was,
in 1892, revised for the express purpose of opening the
" 1 Thus the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers' Union soon gave
Funeral Benefit — usually the lirst to be added ; whilst many of the
branches started their own sick funds. Some of the branches of the
National Union of Gas-workers and General Labourers promptly added
local benefit funds, and the addition of Accident Benefit by the whole
society was presently adopted.
The New Internationalism 421
ranks of this most aristocratic of Unions to practically all
the mechanics in the innumerable branches of the engineer-
ing trade. Special facilities, moreover, were offered by this
and the other great societies to old men and artisans earn-
ing wages insufficient to pay for costly friendly benefits.
Nor was this all. The plumber vied with the engineer, the
carpenter with the shipwright, in helping to form Unions
among the labourers who work with or under them. And
the struggUng Unions of women workers, which had origin-
ally some difficulty in gaining admittance to Trades Councils
and the Trade Union Congress, gratefully acknowledged a
complete change in the attitude of their male fellow- workers.
Not only was every assistance now given to the formation
of special Unions among women workers, but women were,
in some cases, even welcomed as members by Unions of
skilled artisans. A similar widening of sympathies and
strengthening of bonds of fellowship was shown in the very
general establishment of local joint committees of rival''
societies in the same trade, as well as of larger federations.
Robert Knight's failures to form a federal council represent-
ing the different Unions concerned in shipbuilding were
retrieved in 1891 by his successful estabhshment of the
Federation of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades, which
maintained a permanent existence. The increased sense of 7
sohdarity among all sections of wage-earners, moreover, led (^
to a greatly increased cordiality in international relations.-^
The Coal-miners, the Glass Bottle Makers, and the Textile
Operatives established more or less formal federations with
their fellow-workers on the Continent of Europe. At the
frequent international Congresses of these trades, as well as
at the Socialist Congress of the workers of all countries, •
the representatives of the British Trade Unions largely laid
aside that insular conceit which led the Parhamentary Com-
mittee of 1884 to declare that, owing to his superiority, the
British Trade Unionist derived no benefit from international
relations. All this indicates a widening of the mental
horizon, a genuine elevation of the Trade Union. Movement.
7,
CHAPTER VIII
THE TRADE UNION WORLD
[189O-1894]
When we were engaged, between 1890 and 1894, in in-
vestigating the history and organisation of all the several
Unions, no complete statistics as to the extent of the
membership were in existence. We accordingly sought to
obtain, not only an analysis of the Trade Union world as it
then was, but also a complete census of Trade Unionism
from one end of the kingdom to the other. We retain this
analysis practically as it stood in the first edition of the
book in 1894, as a record of the position as it then was —
in subsequent chapters tracing the principal changes and
developments of the last thirty years.
To deal first with the aggregate membership, we were
convinced in 1894 that, although a certain number of small
local societies might have escaped our notice, we had
included every Union then existing which had as many as
1000 members, as well as many falling below that figure.
From these researches we estimated that the total Trade
Union membership in the United Kingdom at the end of
1892 certainly exceeded 1,500,000 and probably did not
reach 1,600,000. Our estimate was presently confirmed.
Working upon the data thus supplied, the Labour Depart-
ment of the Board of Trade extended its investigations,
and now records a Trade Union membership for 1892 of
422
Trade Union Statistics 423
1,502,358.1 The Trade Unionists of 1892 numbered, there-
fore, about 4 per cent of the Census population.
But to gauge the strength of the Trade Union world of
1892 we had to compare the number of Trade Unionists, not
with the total population, but with that portion of it which
might conceivably be included within its boundaries. Thus
at the outset we had to ignore the propertied classes, the
professions, the employers and the brain-workers of every
kind, and confine our attention exclusively to the wage-
earners engaged in manual work. Even of the working-
class so defined we could exclude the children and the
youths under twenty-one, who are not usually eligible for
Trade Union membership. The women present a greater
^ During the whole course of the nineteenth century the Government
failed to ascertain, with any approach to accuracy, how numerous the
Trade Unionists were. Until the appointment of Mr. John Burnett as
Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade in 1886, no attempt was
made to collect, officially, any information about Trade Unionism. The
five annual volumes published by Mr. Burnett between 1886 and 1891
contained a fund of information on Trade Union statistics, and the returns
became year by year more complete. The report for 1891 gave particulars
of 431 Unions with 1,109,014 members, whilst that for 1892 covered a
sUghtly larger total. But, restricted as he was to societies making returns
in the precise form required, Mr. Burnett was unable to get at many
existing Unions, whilst a considerable deduction had to be made from
his total for members counted both in district organisations and in federa-
tions. The Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies gave particulars, in his
Report for 1892 (House of Commons Paper, 146 — II. of March 28, 1893),
of 1,063,000 members in 442 registered Trade Unions alone, after deduct-
ing organisations which are not Trade Unions, and many duplicate entries.
A large number of societies, such as the Northern Counties Amalgamated
Weavers' Association, many of the Miners' Unions, the English and
Scottish Typographical Associations, the United Kingdom Society of
Coachmakers, the Flint Glass Makers, the Yorkshire Glass Bottle Makers,
and others were then (as most of them still are) unregistered. Thus our
own statistics revealed a 50 per cent greater Trade Union membership
than the Government figures. It is difficult to state with exactness the
number of separate organisations included, as this must depend upon the
manner in which federal bodies are regarded. These exhibit almost
infinite variations in character, from the mere " centre of communica-
tion " maintained by the thirty-two completely independent local societies
of Coopers, to the rigid unity of the forty district organisations which make
up the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton-spinners. The
number of independent societies may be reckoned at either 930 or at
anything up to 1750, according to the view taken of federal Unions and
federations. We put it approximately at iioo.
424 The Trade Union World
difficulty to the statistician. The adult female wage-earners
engaged in manual labour in 189 1 were estimated to number
between two and three millions, of which only about 100,000
were even nominally within the Trade Union ranks. To
what extent the men's Trade Unionism was weakened by
its failure to enrol the women workers was a matter of
dispute. From the industrial point of view the answer
depends on complicated economic considerations, such as
the extent to which women compete with men in particular
industries, or women's trades with those in which men are
employed. Owing to the exclusion of women from the
Parliamentary franchise until 1918 their absence from the
Trade Union world detracted little from its political force.
We have dealt elsewhere ^ with the relation of women
workers to the Trade Union organisation. Meanwhile we
omit the women as well as the young persons under twenty-
one from our estimate of the place occupied by Trade
Unionism in working-class life.
We know of no exact statistics as to the total numbers
of the manual-working class. The figures collected by Leone
Levi, and those of Sir Robert Giffen, together with the
inferences to be drawn from the census and from Charles
Booth's works, led us to the conclusion — at best onl\-
hypothetical — that of the nine millions of men over twenty-
one years of age in 1891, about seven millions belonged to
the manual-working class. Out of every hundred of the
population of all ages we could roughly estimate • that
about eighteen are in this sense working men adults.
Accepting for the moment this hypothetical estimate, we
arrived at the conclusion that the Trade Unionists numbered
at this date about 20 per cent of the adult male manual-
working class, or, roughly, one man in five.
But this revised percentage is itself misleading. If the
million and a half Trade LTnionists were evenly distributed
' See our Industrial Democracy and Problenia of Modern Industry:
also Men's and Women's Wages, should they be Equal ? by Mrs. Si<Jii(;y
Webb, 191Q.
The Massing of Trade Unionism 425
among all occupations and through all districts, a move-
ment which comprised only 20 per cent of working men
would be of slight economic or industrial importance, and
of no great weight in the political world. What gave the
Trade Union Movement its significance even thirty years
ago and transformed these million and a half units into an
organised world of their own, was the massing of Trade
Unionists in certain industries and districts in such a way
as to form a powerful majority of the working-class world.
The Trade Unionists were aggregated in the thriving in-
dustrial districts of the North of England. The seven
counties of England north of the Humber and the Dee con-
tained at least 726,000 members of trade societies, or almost
half of the total for the United Kingdom. At a consider-
able distance from these followed the industrial Midlands,
where the seven counties of Leicester, Derby, Notts, Warwick,
Gloucester, Northampton, and Stafford included a total
Trade Union membership of at least 210,000, whilst South
Wales, including Monmouthshire, counted another 89,000
members of trade societies. The vast agglomeration of the
London district, in which we must reckon Middlesex, the
subsidiary boroughs of West Ham, Croydon, Richmond, and
Kingston, as well as Bromley in Kent, yielded not more
than 194,000 Trade Unionists.
These four districts, comprising nearly 21,000,000 in-
habitants, or rather more than two-thirds of the population
of England and Wales, possessed in 1892 twelve-thirteenths
of its Trade Unionists. The total Trade Union membership
in the remainder of the country, with its 8,000,000 of popu-
lation, did not exceed 105,000, largely labourers. The only
county in England in which in 1892 we found no trace of
Trade Union organisation was Rutland, which did not, at
this date, contain a single branch of any Union whatsoever.
But Huntingdonshire, Herefordshire, and Dorsetshire, con-
taining together over 350,000 inhabitants, included, accord-
ing to our estimate, only about 710 Trade Unionists between
them. Scotland, with four millions of population, had
p 2
426 The Trade Union World
i47',ooo Trade Unionists, nearly all aggregated in the narrow
industrial belt between the Clyde and the Forth, two-thirds
of the total, indeed, belonging to Glasgow and the neigh-
bouring industrial centres. Ireland, with three-quarters of
a million more population, counted but 40,000, nine-
tenths of whom belonged to Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and
Limerick.
Of particular counties, Northumberland and Durham at
that date took the lead, closely followed by Lancashire.
The table on following page supphes particulars of this date
for the strongest Trade Union counties in England and
Wales.
This superficial investigation shows us at once that Trade
Unionism coincided in 1892, as it does in 1920, in the main
with density of population. The thinly peopled plains of
Dorsetshire, the Highlands of Scotland, the West of Ireland,
the Cumberland and Westmorland Hills, were practically
devoid of Trade Unionism ; the valleys of the Tyne and
Tees, Lancashire and London, and the busy industrial
villages of the Midlands showed a comparatively high per-
centage. But the correspondence of Trade Unionism with
density of population is by no means exact. Oldham, for
instance, with a population of 201,153, had 25,000 male
Unionists,! or 12.43 per cent, whereas Birmingham (in-
cluding the suburbs of Aston, Handsworth, and Solihull),
with 621,253, had only 26,000, or 4.19 per cent. Newcastle
(including Gateshead), with 328,066 inhabitants, had 26,500
Trade Unionists, or 8.08 per cent, whilst Leeds (including
Wortley, Hunslet, and Burley) had but 16,000 to a popula-
tion of 415,243, or 3.85 per cent. And, most striking ex-
ception of all, the crowded five and a half millions of the
Metropolitan area had but 194,000 Trade Unionists, or only
3.52 per cent of its population, whilst Lancashire, even
including its northern moorlands and its wide agricultural
districts, had 332,000 for less than four millions of people,
* There were, at this date, altogether about 45,000 Unionists in Old-
ham, but of these some 20,000 were women.
County Statistics
427
or 8.63 per cent of its population. Reckoning that 18 out
of every 100 of the population are adult male workmen,
Trade Unionism thus counted among its adherents in some
counties over 50 per cent of the total number of working
men.
Table showing, for certain counties in England, and for South Wales, the
total population in iSgi, the ascertained number of Trade Unionists
in i8g2, and the percentage to population in each case. (In the first
edition of this book the student will find a coloured map of England and
Wales, showing, in five tints, the percentage of Trade Union membership
to Census population in i8gi in the several counties, as estimated in
this table.)
County.
Northumberland ....
Durham
Lancashire
Yorkshire, E. Riding .
Leicestershire
Derbyshire
South Wales and Monmouth-
shire
Nottinghamshire ....
Yorkshire, W. Riding
Gloucestershire
Cheshire
Staffordshire
Suffolk
Warwickshire
Northampton .....
Cumberland
London District (including
Middlesex, Croydon, West
Ham, Richmond, Kingston,
and Bromley) ....
Yorkshire, N. Riding with
York City
Totals
Total Population
in 1891.
506,030
1,024,369
3,957.906
318,570
379,286
432.414
1,325.315
505.311
2,464,415
548,886
707,978
1,103,452
353.758
801,738
308,072
266,549
5.517,583
435.897
20,957,529
Ascertained
Number of Members
of -Trade Societies
in 1892.
56.815
114,810
331.535
23.630
27.845
29.510
88,810
31.050
141,140
26,030
32,000
49.545
14.885
33.600
12,210
10,280
194,083
15,215
1,232,993
Percentage
of Trade
Unionists to
Population.
11.23
II. 21
8.63
7.42
7-34
6.82
6.70
6.14
5-73
4-74
4-52
4-49
4.21
4.19
396
3.86
352
3-49
589
No other county had 15,000 Trade Unionists, nor as much as 3 per
cent of its population in trade societies.
* Of these, some 80,000 were- women. Fully four-fifths of all the
organised women workers were, at this date, included in the Lancashire
textile Trade Unions.
428
The Trade Union World
But this percentage itself fails to give an adequate idea
of the extent to which Trade Unionism, even in 1802,
dominated the industrial centres in whicli it was strongest.
Within the concentration by localities, there was a further
concentration by trades — a fact which to a large extent
explains the geographical distribution. The following table
shows in what proportion the leading industries contributed
to the total Trade Union forces :
Table shoiving the approximate number of members of trade societies in iSrj3
according to industries, in the different parts of the United Kingdom.
Trade.
EnKland and
Wales.*
Scotland.
Ireland.
Toul.
Engineering and Metal
Trades
Building Trades .
Mining
Textile Manufactures .
Clothing and Leather
Trades
Printing Trades .
Miscellaneous Crafts
Labourers and Transport
Workers ....
233.450
114,500
325.750
184,270
78,650
37.950
46.550
302,880
45.300
24,950
21,250
12.330
8,400
5.650
7.450
21,670
8.250
8.550
3.400
2,950
2,400
4,000
10,450
287,000
148,000
347,000
200,000
90,000
46,000
58,000
335.000
Totals ....
1,324,000
147,000
40,000
l,5ii,ooot
• Including the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. which contained
together about 1285 Trade Unionists.
f Included in the above total wore 99,650 women in 5^ Unions, dis-
tributed among the groups as follows ;
Engineering and Metal Trades .... J, 850
Building and Furniture Trades
Mining ....
Textile Manufactures
Clothing and Leather Trades
Printing Trades .
Miscellaneous Crafts
Labourers and Transport Workers
300
80,900
8.650
400
3.450
3.100
99,^50
We may add th.it tlic suliscqiicnlK imblislu'd Bo.inl of Tr.idc st.iti5;tic^
The Metal Trades 429
For the general reader, this table, together with the fore-
going one showing the geographical distribution of Trade
Unionism, completes our statistical survey of the Trade
Union world of 1892. To the student of Trade Union
statistics a more particular enumeration may be useful.
Before we attempt to picture Trade Union life, we shall
therefore devote a dozen pages (which the general reader
may with a clear conscience skip) to the dry facts of organisa-
tion in each of the eight great divisions into which we
distributed the Trade Union membership of 1892.
The first division, comprising all the numerous ramifica-
tions of the engineering, metal-working, and shipbuilding
trades, was then characterised by old-established and highly
developed national Unions, with large membership, cen-
tralised administration, and extensive friendly benefits.
The 287,000 Trade Unionists in this division were enrolled
in over 260 separate societies, but almost one-half belonged
to one or other of four great national organisations, the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers (established 185 1), the
United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipbuilders
(established 1832),! the Friendly Society of Ironfounders
of England, Ireland, and Wales (established 1809), and the
Associated Society of Shipwrights, a belated amalgamation
for 1892, arranged on a slightly different classification, gave the following
totals by industrial groups :
Metal, Engineering and Shipbuilding . , 279,534
Building ....
Mining and Quarrying
Textile ....
Clothing ....
Transport
Other Trades .
157.971
315,272
204,022
83.299
154.947
307.313
1.502.358
See Report on Trade Unions for 1901 (Cd. 773).
^ The Boilermakers claim only to have been estabUshed since 1834,
but there is evidence of the existence of the Society in 1832. In a few
other cases, notably those of the Stonemasons, Plumbers, and Bricklayers,
we have been able to carry the history of the organisation further back
than has hitherto been suspected.
430 The Trade Union World
formed in 1882 by the many ancient local Unions of wooden
shipbuilders. Of these great Unions, that of the Boiler-
makers, with 39,000 members, was incomparably the
strongest, having no rival for the allegiance of its trade
and including practically the whole body of skilled work-
men engaged in iron shipbuilding and boilermaking from one
end of the United Kingdom to the other. The great Unions
of Ironfounders and Shipwrights, with respectively 15,000
and 14,000 members, were not quite so universal as the
Boilermakers. The Associated Society of Ironmoulders
(Ironfounders) of Scotland (established 1831), with 6000
members and a few minor Unions of less skilled ironfounders,
maintained separate organisations ; whilst the Shipwrights'
Provident Union of the Port of London (established 1824,
1400 members), the Liverpool Trade and Friendly Associa-
tion of Shipwrights (estabUshed 1800, 1400 members), and
a few other old-fashioned port Unions still held aloof
from the Shipwrights' amalgamation. ^ The Amalgamated
Society of Engineers, the largest centralised Trade Union in
the kingdom, with 66,000 members at home and 5000
abroad, towered over all its rivals, but had to compete with
compact sectional or local Unions, admitting one or more
of the numerous classes of workmen in the engineering and
machine-making trade. ^ Among the actual producers of
iron and steel, the British Steel Smelters' Association (estab-
lished 1886), with 2400 members, originally a Scotch Union,
was extending all over the kingdom ; whilst the Associated
Society of Iron and Steel Workers (established 1862), with
^ The equally archaic port Unions of the Sailmakers, dating, like those
of the Shipwrights, from the last century, were united in the Federation
of Sailmakers of Great Britain and Ireland (established 1890), with 1250
members.
2 Of these the most important were the Steam-Engine Makers' Society
(established 1824, 6000 members), the Associated Blacksmiths' Society
(a Scottish organisation, established 1857, 2300 members), the United
Kingdom Pattern Makers' Association (established 1872, 2500 members),
the National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers (estabhshed 1872,
6500 members), the United Journeymen Brassfounders' Association of
Great Britain and Ireland (estabhshed 1866, 2500 members), and the
United Machine Workers' Association (established 1844, 2500 members).
The Building Trades
431
7800 members, occupied a unique position in the Trade
Union world from its long and constant devotion to the
sliding scale. The tin and hollow - ware workers, ^ the
chippers and drillers, the Sheffield cutlers, and the crafts-
men in precious metals were split up into innumerable local
societies, with little federal union.
It is interesting to notice the large proportion which
this division of Trade Unionists in Scotland bore to the
total for that country. Whilst in England and Wales it
formed only one-sixth of the aggregate number, in Scotland
it measured nearly one-third, almost entirely centred about
Glasgow.
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists in each group of
the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Total.
Engineers and ^Machine
Makers
Smiths and Farriers
Brass and Copper Workers
Sheet Metal Workers . .
Ironfounders and Core-
makers
Shipbuilding and Boiler
making
Iron and Steel Smelters .
Workers in Precious Metals
Sundry ^letal Workers
74,000
7.350
13.350
16,000
15.500
45.500
23.500
3.500
34.750
8.250
2,250
2,000
1,300
7.250
13.250
1.500
9.500
2.750
300
150
200
500
3,600
750
8,250
85,000
9,900
15.500
17.500
23.250
62,350
25,000
3.500
45,000
Totals ....
233.450
45.300
287,000
The organisation of Builders and Furniture Makers re-
sembled in many respects that of the Engineers and Ship-
builders. The 148,000 Trade Unionists in this division were
sorted into 120 separate Unions ; but again we find one-
half of them belonging to one or other of three centralised
^ The makers of tin plates had a Union in South Wales (established
1871, and reorganised 1887) which claimed a membership of 10,000. The
National Amalgamated Tinplate Workers' Association of Great Britain
(established 1876) had 3000 members, and the General Union of Sheet
Metal Workers (established 1861) had 1250 members.
432 The Trade Union World
Trade Friendly Societies of national scope. Of these the
Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons (established 1832,
16,000 members) was the most powerful, having practically
no rival throughout England or Ireland, and maintaining
friendly relations with the corresponding United Operative
Masons' Association of Scotland (estabUshed 1831, 5000
members). But the largest and richest Union in this
division was the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and
Joiners (established i860, 34,000 members at home and
4000 abroad). Although this Society could count but a
small proportion of the total number of carpenters in the
kingdom, it included three-fourths of those who were Trade
Unionists, the remaining fourth being divided between the
Associated Carpenters and Joiners of Scotland (established
1861, 6000 members), the old General Union of Carpenters
and Joiners of England (established 1827, 4000 members),
and a few tiny trade clubs in the Metropolis which had
refused to merge themselves in either of the national organ-
isations. The Bricklayers were in much the same position
as the Carpenters. The Operative Bricklayers' Society
(established 1848, 22,000 members) included three-fourths
of the Trade Unionists, the remainder being found either
in the United Operative Bricklayers' Trade, Accident, and
Burial Society (established 1832, 2500 members), or in a
few isolated local trade clubs in Scotland and Ireland. Of
the other Unions in the Building Trades, the United Opera-
tive Plumbers' Association of Great Britain and Ireland
(established 1832, reorganised 1865, 6500 members) was by
far the most effective and compact, and was specially in-
teresting as retaining practically the federal constitution of
the Builders' Union of 1830-34. With the exception of the
United Operative Plumbers' Association of Scotland (estab-
lished 1872, 700 members), a small society resulting from a
secession, no rival organisation existed. On the other hand,
the Painters, Slaters, Packing-case Makers, Upholsterers,
and French Polishers were split up into numberless small
Unions, whilst the Cabinetmakers and Plasterers had each
The Miners
433
one considerable organisation ^ and several smaller societies,
which, however, included but a small proportion of the
trade.
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists in the various
branches of the Building and Furniture Trades.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Total.
Stonemasons ....
Bricklayers
Carpenters . . . : .
Cabinetmakers ■ .
Sawyers and other Wood-
workers
Plasterers
Painters
Plumbers
Upholsterers and French
PoHshers
Sundry Building Trades
16,750
24,000
33.000
7,200
4.250
7.500
12,400
5.400
2,500
1.500
8,250
700
7.850
2,000
350
1,000
2,150
1,200
450
1,000
250
2,300
3.250
300
150
500
1,000
400
300
100
25.250
27,000
44,100
9,500
4.750
9,000
15.550
7,000
3.250
2,600
Totals
114,500
24.950
8,550
148,000
The Miners and Quarrymen, comprising about sixty-five
societies, were in 1892 the best organised of the eight great
divisions into which we classified the Trade Union forces.
Among the coalminers the " county," or district Union,
without friendly benefits, was the predominating type.
Nearly two-thirds of the whole 347,000 Trade Unionists in
this division were gathered into the Miners' Federation of
Great Britain (established 1888), a federal Union comprising
about twenty independent organisations, some of which, like
the Yorkshire Miners' Association (established 1858, 55,000
members), were highly centralised, whilst others, like the
Lancashire Miners' Federation (established 1881, 43,000
members), were themselves federal bodies. The Miners'
Federation, whilst not interfering with the financial auton-
omy or internal administration of its constituent bodies,
1 The AlUance Cabinetmakers' Association (established 1865, 5500
members) and the National Association of Operative Plasterers (estab-
lished 1862, 7000 members).
434
The Trade Union World
effectively centralised the industrial and Pariiamentary
policy of the whole army of its members from Fife to Somer-
set. Outside the Federation at this date stood the powerful
and compact Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident
Association (established 1863, 17,000 members), and Durham
Miners' Association (established 1869, 50,000 members), to-
gether with the solid little Mid and West Lothian Miners'
Association (established 1885, 3600 members), and the loose
organisations of Sliding Scale contributors which then figured
as Trade Unions in South Wales.^ The coal and iron miners
of the West of Scotland had scarcely got beyond the ephem-
eral pit club and occasional Strike Union. Among the tin,
lead, and copper miners Trade Unionism, as far as we can
ascertain, was absolutely unknown.
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists among the
persons engaged in or about Mines and Quarries.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
TotaL
Coal and Iron Miners .
Colliery Enginenien
Cokemen, Overmen, Colliery
Mechanics, &c.
Quarrymen
Shale Oil Workers . . .
301,000
5,000
9,250
10,500
17.500
1.500
500
1-750
;;
318.500
6,500
9,750
10,500
1.750
Totals ....
325.750
21,250
• •
347,000
The salient fact of Trade Unionism among the textile
operatives in 1892 was that effective organisation was nearly
confined to the workers in cotton, who contributed at least
two-thirds of the 200,000 Trade Unionists in this division.
Like the Miners the Cotton Operatives have always shown
* The South Wales miners were, at this date, in a transition state.
The Miners' Federation had gained a considerable following in Monmouth-
shire and Glamorgan, but the bulk of the men still adhered to the Sliding
Scale machinery, claiming 36,000 members, for the maintenance of which
a fortnightly contribution was usually deducted by the employers from
the miners' earnings. The Forest of Dean Miners' Association (4000
members) secedetl from tl>e Federation in 1893. A small Miners' Union
(2250 members) at West Bromwich also held aloof.
^ The Cotton Operatives 435
a strong preference for federal Associations \\4th exclusively
trade objects. The powerful Amalgamated Association of
Operative Cotton-spinners (established 1853), a federal
Union of 19,500 members comprising forty separate dis-
trict associations, joined with its sister federations, the
Northern Counties Amalgamated Association of Weavers
(estabhshed 1884, 71,000 members) and the Amalgamated
Association of Card and Blowing Room Operatives (31,000
members, estabhshed 1886), in the United Textile Factory
Workers' Association (established 1886). This Association,
formed exclusively for Parhamentary purposes, focussed the
very considerable political influence of 125,000 organised
cotton operatives in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire,
and was, next to the Miners' Federation, by far the most
powerful Trade Union organi'sation in the country. ^
The highly developed organisation of the Cotton
Operatives contrasted with the feebleness of the Woollen-
workers. In the other branches of textile manufacture the
extreme locaUsation of the separate industries had given
rise to isolated county or district organisations of lace,
hosiery, silk, flax, or carpet-workers usually confined to
small areas, and exercising comparatively little influence in
the Trade Union world. Incomparably the strongest among
them was the Amalgamated Society of Operative Lace-
makers (3500 members), which comprised practically aU the
adult male workers in the Nottingham machine-lace trade.
If we exclude the constituent organisations of the United
Textile Factory Workers' Association, the separate Unions
in the various branches of the textile industry numbered 115.
^ The Cotton-spinners' Union was then composed exclusively of adult
males, the boy " piecers " being brigaded in subordinate organisations.
In the Cotton-weavers and Card-room Operatives' Unions women formed
a large majority of the members.
[Table
436
The Trade Union World
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists in the various
branches of the Textile Manufacture.
Trade.
Op
Cotton-spinners .
Cotton-weavers .
Cotton Card-room
tives ....
Woollen-workers
Woolsorters, Combers,
Silkworkers .
Flax and Linen-workers
Carpet-weavers .
Hosiery-workers
Lacemakers .
Elastic Webworkers.
Dyers, Bleachers,
Finishers .
Overlookers .
Calico-printers and
gravers
Miscellaneous Textiles
Totals
&c.
and
En
England,
19.500
82,500
31,000
6,000
2,500
2,500
150
2,600
6,350
4.500
700
11,820
4.850
1,950
7.350
184,270
Scotland.
Ireland.
500
••
9.500
• •
60
300
2,940
400
100
50
i
180
100
200
200
500
50
650
12,330
3.400
Total.
19,500
83,000
31,000
15.500
2,500
2,560
3.390
3.000
6,500
4.500
700
12,100
5.250
2,500
8,000
200,000
The large section of workers engaged in the manufacture
of clothing and leather goods was, perhaps, the least organ-
ised of the skilled trades. One society, indeed, the National
Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (established 1874),
counted almost 43,000 members, and exercised a very real
control over the machine boot trade. And although the
hand industry was in this case rapidly declining, the
Amalgamated Association of Boot and Shoemakers (estab-
lished 1862) maintained and even increased the earnings of
this body of 4706 skilled handicraftsmen. The Tailors, on
the other hand, had succeeded neither in controlling the
new machine industry, nor in uphokiing the standard earn-
ings of the handworkers. The Amalgamated Society of
Tailors (estabhshed 1866, 17,000 members), together with
the Scottish National Operative Tailors' Society (established
1866, 4500 members), had absorbed all the local Unions,
The Printing Trades
437
but included only a small proportion of those at work in
the trade. The Felt Hatters and Trimmers' Union (estab-
lished 1872) had 4300 members, together with a women's
branch (established 1886) numbering nearly as many. In
other branches of this division some strong organisations
existed in the smaller industries, but the workers for the
most part formed only feeble local clubs or else were totally
unorganised. There were altogether over sixty separate
Unions in this division.
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists in the Clothing
and Leather Trades.
Trade.
England.
Scotlaird.
Ireland.
Total.
Boot and Shoemakers .
Other Leather Workers
Tailors and other Clothing
Makers
Hatmakers, Glovers, &c.
46,250
5,900
16,100
10,400
78,650
2,250
550
5,500
100
500
100
2,300
50
49,000
6,550
23,900
10,550
Totals ....
8,400
2.950
90,000
The 46,000 Trade Unionists in the paper and printing
trades were divided between four considerable Unions \vith
27,000 members, and forty-five little societies numbering
not more than 19,000 altogether. The compositors lead off
with three extensive organisations, the London Society of
Compositors, confined to the Metropolis (established 1848,
9800 members), the Typographical Association (estabhshed
1849, 11,500 members), which had absorbed all but four of
the Irish and four of the Enghsh local societies outside the
Metropolis, and the Scottish Typographical Association
(established 1852, 3000 members). The Bookbinders and
Machine Rulers' Consolidated Union (established 1835, 3000
members), mainly composed of provincial workers, far ex-
ceeded the London Consolidated Bookbinders' Society, the
largest of half-a-dozen Metropohtan Unions in this trade.
438
TJie Trade Union World
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists in the various
branches of the Paper and Printing Trades.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Totil
Compositors and Press and
Machine Men ....
Bookbinders
Papermakers
Miscellaneous Printing Trades
27,250
5.150
3.150
2,400
4,000
700
500
450
2,000
300
100
33.250
6,150
3.650
2,950
Totals ....
37.950
5.650
2,400
46,000"
There remained a number of trades which it was difficult
to classify. These miscellaneous crafts furnished over 130
societies and 58,000 Trade Unionists. Some, like the
Coopers, Cigarmakers, Brushmakers, Basketmakcrs, and
Glassworkers, were usually well organised ; others, like the
Coachbuilders, Potters, Bakers, and Ropeworkers, included
but a small percentage of their trades. ^
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists tn the
Miscellaneous Trades.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Total.
Basket and Brushmakers .
2,800
350
100
3.250
Coach and Waggon Builders
6,000
400
600
7,000
Coopers
4.400
1,300
300
6,000
Glassworkers ....
7.350
500
150
8,000
Millers and Bakers .
7,000
2,500
2.500
12,000
Potters
6.250
1.650
...
7,900
Sundry Trades ...
12.750
46.550
750
350
13.850
Totals ....
7.450
4,000
58,000
The great army of labourers, seamen, and transport
workers of every kind we enclosed in a single division.
Out of the 120 organisations belonging to this group the
1 The United Kiugdom Society of Coachniakers (established 1834) had
5500 members. The Mutual Association of Coopers (cstabUshed 187S) was
then a loose federation of old-fashioned local Unions, with about 6000
members.
The Lahotirers Unions 439
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (established
1872), vsith its permanent membership of 31,000, its high
contributions, extensive friendl}^ benefits, and large accumu-
lated funds, resembled in character the large national
societies of the engineering and building trades. Alongside
this stood the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers
and Firemen (established 1880, 7000 members). Some other
Unions in this group, such as the London and Counties
Labour League (estabhshed 1872, 13,000 members), and the
National Agricultural Labourers' Union (estabhshed 1872,
15,000 members), had become essentially friendl}^ societies.
But the predominating type in this division was, as might
have been expected, the new Union, with low contributions,
fluctuating membership, and mihtant trade pohcy. Of these
the strongest and apparently the most stable was the
National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers
(estabhshed 1889), ^^ith 36,000 members on the books.
Next in membership came the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside
Labourers' Union (estabhshed 1889), the Tyneside and
National Labour Union (estabhshed 1889), and the National
Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen's Union (established
1887), each with a membership fluctuating between 20,000
and 40,000. Other prominent Unions in this di\dsion were
the General Railway Workers' Union (established 1889),
the National Union of Dock Labourers (established 1889),
the National Amalgamated Coalporters' Union (estabhshed
1890), and the Navvies, Bricklayers' Labourers, and General
Labourers' Union (estabhshed 1890). The builders' labourers
and the carmen were organised in numerous local Unions,
which, in some cases, such as the Mersey Quay and Railway
Carters' Union (estabhshed 1887), and the Leeds Amalga-
mated Association of Builders' Labourers (estabhshed 1889),
were effective trade societies. The chief exponent of New
Unionism among the agricultural labourers was then the
Eastern Counties Labour Federation (established 1890),
which had enroUed 17,000 members in Suffolk and the
neighbouring counties. But any statistical estimate of the
440
21ie Trade Union World
ill-defined and constantly fluctuating membership of tlie
Unions in this division must necessaril}'' be of less value
than in the more definitel}' organised trades. ^
Table showing the approximate number of Trade Unionists among the
Labourers and Transport Workers of every kind.
Trade.
England.
Scotland.
Ireland.
Total.
Seamen, Fishermen, Water-
men, &c
Railway Traffic Workers .
Enginemen, &c. (other than
Colliery or Railway) .
Carmen, &c
Miscellaneous Labourers
33.850
43,500
6,300
19,000
200,230
3.900
1,500
370
3.500
12,400
1.500
3.000
100
1,000
4,850
10.450
39,250
48,000
6,770
23,500
217,480
Totals ....
302,880
21.670
335.000
It would have been an interesting addition to our
statistics. if we could have added to these tables a column
showing the proportion which the Unionists in each trade
bore to the total number of workers in it. Unfortunately
the classification of the census 2 is not sufficiently precise to
enable this to be done. We were therefore thrown back
upon such information on the point as we can obtain from
other sources. We knew, for instance, that in Lancashire
^ We did not include in the above statistics the Unions in classes not
included among the manual workers. The National Union of Teachers,
established 1870, was, already in 1S92, a powerful organisation with
23,000 members. The Telegraph Clerks, Life Assurance Agents, and
Shop Assistants also had Unions varying from 1000 to 5000 members,
and there were two organisations of postal employees. The National
Unions of Clerks and Domestic Servants were less definitely established.
There were also small societies among the London Dock Foremen and
Clerks and the Poplar Ships' Clerks.
Nor did we include such essentially benefit societies as the Marine
Engineers' Union (9500 members) and the United Kingdom Pilots'
Association, which were composed largely of workmen belonging for liade
purposes to particular Trade Unions.
' The census figures for 1891 merge, for each trade, " workmen, assis-
tants, apprentices, and labourers." They do not, for instance, distinguish
between Bricklayers and Bricklayers' Labourers, who belong to very
different Trade Unions. Under Hosiers or Hatters are included shop-
keepers and their assistants, as well as the manufacturing operatives.
Who are the Non-Unionists? 441
the Amalgamated Association of Cotton-spinners included
practically every competent workman engaged in the trade.
The same might be said of the Boilermakers' Society in all
the iron shipbuilding ports, though not in some of the Mid-
land districts. And to turn to an even larger industry,
80 per cent of the coalminers were in union, some dis-
tricts, such as Northumberland and parts of the West Riding
of Yorkshire, having practically every hewer in the society.
And in other industries and localities the Union was some-
times equally inclusive. Among the Dublin Coopers or
the Midland Flint Glass Makers, the Nottingham Lace-
makers or the Yorkshire Glass Bottle Makers, non-Unionism
was practically unknowni. We see, therefore, that instead
of numbering only 4 per cent of the total population, the
Trade Union world was in certain districts and in certain
industries, already in 1892 practically coextensive with the
manual labour class. On the other hand, there were many
occupations in which Trade Unionism was non-existent.
Whole classes of manual workers were practically excluded
from the Trade Union ranks by the fact that they were not
hired workers at wages. In the nooks and crannies of our
industrial system were to be found countless manual workers
who obtained a precarious livelihood by direct ser\dce of
the consumer. Every town and village had its quota of
hawkers, costermongers, tallymen, and other petty dealers ;
of cobblers, tinkers, knifegrinders, glaziers, chairmenders,
plumbers, and other jobbing craftsmen ; of cab-runners,
" corner boys," men who " hang about the bridges," and
all the innumerable parasites of the hfe of a great city.
When we passed from these " independent producers " to
the trades in which the small master survived, or in which
home work prevailed, we saw another region almost barren
of Trade Unionism. The tailors and cabinetmakers, for
instance, though often highly-skilled craftsmen, had only a
small minority of their trades in Union, whilst the chain
and nailmakers were almost unorganised. The effect upon
Trade Unionism of a backward type of industrial organisa-
442 The Trade Union World
tion was well seen in the manufacture of boots and shoes.
In Leicestershire and Stafford, where the work was done
in large factories, practically every workman was in the
Union. In the Midland villages, where this was carried on
as a domestic industry, and in East London, where it was
only passing out of that phase, the National Society of Boot
and Shoe Operatives counted but a small proportion of
members. And in those districts in which the small master
system still held its own it cast a blight even on other
trades. Thus the Birmingham district and East London
were bad Trade Union centres, not only for the sweated
trades, but also for those carried on in large estabUshments.
But the great bulk of non-Unionism was to be found in
another field. The great army of labourers, as distinguished
from mechanics, miners, or factory operatives, were in
nomial times as unorganised as the women workers. Except
in certain counties, such as Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk, Oxford-
shire, Wiltshire, and the Fen districts. Trade Unionism among
the farm labourers could scarcely be said to exist. Of the
three-quarters of a million of agricultural labourers in the
United Kingdom, not more than 40,000 were then in union.
Nor were the other classes of labour in much better plight.
The two hundred thousand workers in the traffic depart-
ment of the railways contributed only 48,000 Trade Union-
ists, mostly from such grades as guards and engine-drivers.
The large class of tramway and omnibus workers had, after
a brief rally, reverted to a state of disorganisation. The
great army of warehousemen, porters, and other kinds of
city labourers counted only a few hundred Trade Unionists
in all the kingdom.
The Trade Union world was, therefore, in 1892, in the
main composed of skilled craftsmen working in densely
populated districts, where industry was conducted on a large
scale. About one-half of the members belonged to the
three staple trades of coalmining, cotton manufacture, and
engineering, whilst the labourers and the women workers
were, at this date, on the whole, non-Unionists. .
Trade Union Influence
But the influence of Trade Unionism on working-class
life cannot be measured by the numbers actually contribut-
ing to the Union funds at any one time. Among the non-
Unionists in the skilled trades a large proportion have at
one time or another belonged to their societies. Though
they have let their membership lapse for one reason or
another, they follow the lead of the Union, and are mostly
ready, on the slightest encouragement from its members, or
improvement in their own position, to rejoin an organisa-
tion to which in spirit they still belong. In the Labour
Unions the instability of employment and the constant
shifting of residence caused the organisation, in 1892, to
resemble a sieve, through which a perpetual stream of
members was flo\\-ing, a small proportion only remaining
attached for any length of time. These lapsed members
constitute in some sense a volunteer force of Trade Unionism
ready to fight side by side with their old comrades, provided
that means can be found for their support. Moreover, the
Trade Unionists not only belong to the most highly-skilled
and best-paid industries, but they include, as a general rule,
the picked men in each trade. The moral and intellectual
influence which they exercise on the rest of their class is,
therefore, out of all proportion to their numbers. In their
ranks are found, in almost every industrial centre, all the
prominent leaders of working-class opinion. They supply
the directors of the co-operative stores, the administrators
of clubs and friendly societies, and the working-class repre-
sentatives on Parish, District, and Towti Councils. Finally
we may observe that the small but rapidly increasing class
of working-men pohticians invariably consists of men who
are members of a trade society. We may safely assert that,
even in 1892, no one but a staunch Trade Unionist would
have had any chance' of being returned as a working-class
member to the House of Commons, or elected to a local
governing body as a Labour representative.
It is therefore impossible by a statistical survey to give
any adequate idea of the Trade Union world of 1892. We
444 ^^^^ Trade Union World
may note the fact that the thousand separate unions or
brandies between Blyth and Middlesborough numbered
some 200,000 members. We may ascertain that within
fifteen miles of the Manchester Exchange at least as many
Trade Unionists Hved and worked. But no figures can
convey any real impression of the place which the Trade
Union, even then, filled in the every-day life of the skilled
artisans of the United Kingdom. We are therefore fortunate
in being able to supplement our statistics by a graphic
description of Trade Union life supplied to us in 1893 by a
skilled craftsman, who joined his Union on the expiration
of his apprenticeship, and served for some timg in \arious
official capacities.
To an apprentice. Trade Unionism is little more than a name.
He may occasionally overhear the men in his shop discussing
their Union and its work ; and he knows that after " club night "
a number of stories of the incidents of the meeting will be
related ; whilst, if he works in a strong Society shop, he may
even hear heated discussions on. resolutions submitted to the
meeting. But the chief topic will always be the personal one —
who was at the meeting, and what old chums were met ; for
the " club " is generally the recognised meeting-place for " old
cronies " in the trade. If he works in a shop where any of the
Trade Union officials are also employed he may sometimes receive
a word of advice and exhortation " to be sure to join the Society
when he is a man." On the whole, however, his knowledge of,
and interest in, the Society will be very slight. But should a
strike occur at his shop whilst he is yet a lad, the presence and
power of the Trade Union will be brought very vividly home to
hini ; and as he works by himself or with the other lads in an
otherwise deserted shop he will form some opinions of liis own.
He will naturally feel a violent antip.itliy to the " Blacks " brought
into liis shop, for the sense of comradeship is strong among boys ;
and he will notice with considerable pleasure that they are usually
inferior workmen. But in spite of this, if the employer is " a
good sort," who treats him well and kindly, he will probably still
think that tlie men are wrong to strike. For the boy regards
the empk)yer as the one " who finds work for the men to do,"
and hence looks upon a strike as an act of ingratitude ; and
further, he has also a vague idea that tlie men are in the position
Joining the Union 445
of being many to one, and hence he promptly sides with the
weaker party.
As the youth draws near the end of his apprenticeship he finds
that he is frequently spoken to by Union men and urged to join
the Society. He notices, too, that more attention is paid to him,
and that his opinions are frequently asked upon trade matters.
Finally he is invited round to the little public in which the
club meetings are held, and introduced to the Lodge officials, and
to a number of his fellow-tradesmen. The advantages offered by
the Society are freely dilated upon, great stress being laid upon
the friendly benefits — the sick, superannuation, funeral, and,
above all, the out-of-work pay. For the Trade Society is the
only institution which provides an out-of-work benefit. Against
sickness and death he may already be insured in one or other of
the numerous Friendly Societies ; but the out-of-work pay is
never provided except by a Trade Society, since only there is it
possible to know whether a claimant is out of work by reason of
bad trade, or bad character, or inefficiency, or even if he is really
out of work at all. i And as the advantages of this provision are
pointed out to him he recollects the time when his father, a staid,
steady-going mechanic, was thrown out of work by slack times ;
and the memory of that bitter experience clings very closely to
him. Perhaps he is also in love. The thought of seeing " her "
miserable and their children hungry whilst he himself is helpless
to assist, must always be one of the most harrowing things to
a careful young artisan, with visions of a happy little home in
the near future. There is, however, another view of the club
which appeals with almost equal force to our young artisan just
out of his apprenticeship and finding himself in possession of an
income nearly double that to which he has been accustomed.
The Trade Union Meeting House is the recognised club for the
men in the craft, and thus presents many social attractions.
Friendships are made — numerous " sing-songs " and smoking
concerts arranged ; and the joke and friendly glass, the good
cheer and the convi\dality, all present great attractions to the
young workman.
The club is also a centre for obtaining the latest trade news.
Here come the unemployed from other towns ; here are to be
heard reports of reductions or advance of wages, increased or
diminished working hours, stories of tyranny, or the first rumours
of that bug-bear to the men — the invention of new machines,
with its probable displacement of their labour ; or even worse,
the introduction of women and boys at reduced prices. There
446 The Trade Union World
is also an occasional visit from an important official of the central
office to look forward to, and his words to digest afterwards. All
these attractions incline the young artisan to enrol himself in
the Lodge, but it is mainly personal considerations which in the
end decide him to take the step. Are the good men in his trade
— ^those whom he likes, who have treated him well, helped him
out of his difficulties and given him coppers when a lad ; the
powerful men, the foremen, and those whose words carry most
weight with their fellows — are these men members of the Union ?
If they are, and if, as is most probable in a Society shop, he has
formed friendships with other young fellows who are already
members, it is not long before he consents, and allows himself to
be duly proposed as a candidate for membership.
The next club night sees Mm at the door of the club-room
waiting anxiously, and perhaps timorously, whilst the formalities
go on inside. Usually the ordinary business of the evening is all
disposed of before the election of new members takes place. At
the first mention by the President of the fact that a candidate is
waiting to be elected, the doorkeeper (hitherto posted inside the
door to see that no one comes in or goes out surreptitiously, and
that none of the " worthy brothers " are in an unfit state to enter
the room) slips rapidly outside, and holding the door firmly,
refuses admission to any one while the ceremony lasts. The
President then rising, calls for order, and having read out the
name of the candidate and those of his proposer and seconder,
asks those members to tell the Lodge what they know about him.
Then the proposer rises, and addressing " Mr. President and
worthy brothers," states what he knows — that the candidate is
a young man, apprenticed in his shop and duly served his time —
a good workman and a steady young fellow — anxious to join the
Society and sure to be a credit to the Lodge. He resumes liis
seat amid aj^plause ; and the seconder rises and repeats the same
eulogy. Then the candidate is called into the room, the door-
keeper admitting him with some ceremony. He enters in fear
and trcmbUng ; for the formality of admission, though shorn ol
its former mysterious rites, is still conducted with sufficient
solemnity to make it loom as something rather terrible. At
once he finds himself the object of the friendly curiosity of the
members, and the cause of applause, all of which adds considerably
to his nervousness and trepidation. But he is agreeably surprised
to find the ceremony a very meagre one. The President, rising,
calls upon all the members to do likewise, and then, all standing,
he reads out an initiatory address, and a portion of the Rules of
The Lodge Meeting 447
the Society. Then in a simple affirmation the candidate pledges
himself to abide by the Rules, to study the interests of the Society,
and neither to do, nor, if he can prevent it, allow to be done,
anything in opposition thereto. He has then to formally sign this
pledge. That being done, his name is entered as a member, and
upon paying his entrance fee, he is presented with a card of
membership and a book of Rules of the Society.
He is now an ordinary member of the Lodge, and this newly
acquired dignity is fully brought home to him in the course of a
week or so, when he receives his first summons to attend a Lodge
meeting. He wends his way to the Httle public-house in the dirty
back street where the Lodge is held, and arriving shortly before
eight o'clock, the time fixed for the opening of business, finds a
number of his fellow-workmen congregated round the bar dis-
cussing the evening's programme and trade matters generally.
The men come in by twos and threes, and he notices that, with
few exceptions, all are neat and clean, having been home and had
their tea and a wash in the interval between then and working
hours. 1 The officers of the Lodge arriving, are greeted with a
general recognition as they pass upstairs to prepare the club-room
for the business of the evening. Shortly after the hour fixed for
commencing, the President takes the chair, and, as the men
slowly straggle up into the room, rises and declares the meeting
open for business. The club-room is a long, low-ceilinged room
which constitutes the first floor of the public-house. Down the
centre of the room runs a trestle table with forms along the sides,
on which the members are seating themselves. At the top a
shorter table is placed crosswise, forming a letter T, and here sits
the group of officers. The room is decorated with the framed
" emblems " of various trade societies, interspersed with gilt
mirrors and advertising almanacs. At one end is a throne and
canopy, showing that it is used also as a club-room by one or
other of the friendly societies which still maintain the curious old
rites of their orders. In a comer stands a cottage pianoforte,
indicating that the room is also used for concerts, sing-songs,
and convivial gatherings.
The first business of the evening is the payment of contribu-
tions. The Secretary, aided by the " Check Secretary," the
^ Old members often recall the days when the men used to come to
the club straight from work, and " in their dirt." They frequently ascribe
the orderly behaviour at club meetings at the present time, as compared
v.dth the rowdiness of the past, largely to this change of habit, itself a
direct result of the reduction of the hours of labour.
448 The Trade Union World
Money Steward, and Treasurer, receives the subscriptions from
the men as they come, one by one, up the room, enters the
payment in the books, and signs the members' cards. In many
cases women and children come to pay the subscriptions of their
Imsbands or fathers ; and he will feel a sense of shame at the idea
of these having to come through the public bar to perform their
errand. When the subscriptions are all received, the unemployed
members, and the wives or other relatives of those who are sick,
present themselves to draw their respective benefits. General
inquiries are made after the health and hopes arc expressed for the
speedy recovery of the sick ones ; and the sums due are paid out
by the officials with considerable formality. During these pro-
ceedings there has been a constant hum of conversation in the
room, and a continual running in and out of members to the bar,
and back again. But all this now comes to an end. The
President rises and calls for order. Strangers and non-members
ai'e cleared out of the room. The doorkeeper takes up his
position inside the door to watch the comers-in and goers-out ;
and the drink-stewards make ready to attend to the members'
wants, and act as waiters, in order to dispense with strangers in
the room, and to prevent any unnecessary bustle.and confusion.^
The business of the evening opens with the reading of the
minutes of the last meeting. Questions concerning the enforce-
ment of some resolution, or the result of some instructions given
to the officers, are asked and answered, and the minutes are
confirmed by a show of hands and signed by the President. Then
letters received, and copies of those despatched by the Secretary
since the last meeting are read. These include letters from the
General Office interpreting some rule as to the pajmient of
benefits, from the District Committee giving notice of a trade
regulation, and from other branch secretaries asking for particulars
as to the character and ability of some canthdate for admission.
Then follows the excitement of the evening — the report of
delegates appointed to interview an employer on some grievance.
They will explain how they waited on Mr. So-and-so, who at
first refused to see them, and ordered them off liis premises ; how
presently he came round and listened to their complaints ; how
he denied the e.xistence of the alleged evil, and demanded the
names of the men who complained, which tiic delegates of course
refused to give ; and how at last, after much dispute, he tem-
porised, and gave them to understand that the grievance would be
* Many Unions forbid all drinking during the branch meeting.
Appeals 449
remedied. Then the members present from the shop in question
are called upon to explain what improvements, if any, have been
made in the matters of wliich they complained. If their report
is satisfactory, the subject is allowed to drop. If not, there is a
heated discussion. Our friend, seated with the young fellows at
the back of the room, finds himself clamouring for a strike. The
officers do their best to hold the meeting back. They suggest
that the District Committee ^ ought first to be communicated
with ; or if the grievance is one against which the General Rules
or District Bye-laws permit the men to strike without superior
sanction, they urge further negotiations with the employer. The
discussion is eventually closed by an order to the Secretary to
write to the District Committee for advice, or by an instruction
to the delegates to again interview the offending employer, and
if he " bamboozles " them a second time, to strike the shop.
This excitement over, the interest of the meeting flags, and
members drop out one by one. Perhaps there is an appeal by
a member to whom the Committee has refused some benefit to
which he thinks himself entitled. Against this decision he
appeals to his fellow-members in Lodge assembled, urging his
long membership, his wife and family, and his work for the
Union as reasons why he should be leniefftly dealt with. Elo-
quent speeches are made on his behalf by personal friends. But
the Committee and the officers declare that they have acted
according to the Rules, and remind the Lodge that if they are
ordered to pay an illegal benefit, the Central Office will disallow
the amount, and order the members to repay it to the Union
funds. With a strong Committee the vote will be against the
man ; with a weak one, and especially if the man is a jovial and
" free-and-easy " comrade, his friends will turn up in sufficient
numbers to carry the appeal. It being now ten o'clock, all other
business — such as resolutions proposed by individual members —
gets adjourned to the next club night, and the President declares
the Lodge duly closed. The Secretary hastens home, to sit up
burning midnight oil in balancing the books, entering the minutes,
making reports to the Central Executive or District Committee,
and writing the letters ordered by the meeting.
The Lodge meeting soon plays an important part in the Hfe of
our active-minded artisan. He feels that he is taking part in the
^ In the great Amalgamated Societies District Committees, composed
of representatives of local branches, are formed in the great industrial
Centres, and decide on the trade policy to be adopted by their constituent
branches. These decisions must be confirmed by the Central Executive.
Q
450 The Trade Union World
actual government of a national institution. Special meetings
are held to discuss and vote on questions submitted by the
Executive to the whole body of the members, such as the
alteration of a rule, the election of some central official, or a
grant in aid of another trade. But primarily the Lodge is his
Court of Appeal against all industrial tyranny, a court in which
he is certain of a ready and sympathetic hearing. There he takes
complaints of fines and deductions, of arbitrary foremen, of low
piecework prices — of anything, in short, which affects his interest
or comfort as a wage-earner.
The tendency of this ever-present power and actuality of the
Lodge and its officials is to overshadow in the mind of the
member the larger functions and responsibilities of the Central
Executive. To him they are something far away in the vast
outside world, and their powers are very vague and shadowy.
They are, however, brought home to him in some of the incidents
of his Trade Union and working life. There is, for instance,
the " emblem " of his Society, a large and generally highly-
coloured representation of the various processes of the trade in
which he is engaged, often excellently designed and executed.
This, purchased for a few shilhngs soon after his admission to
the Society, or more probably at the time of his marriage, is
hung, gaily framed, in his front parlour. On it is recorded his
name, age, and date of admission to the Society, and it bears the
signatures, and perhaps the portraits, of the general officers. To
him it is some slight connecting link with the other men in his
trade and Society. To his mfe it is the charter of their rights
in case of sickness, want of work, or death. As such it is an
object of pride in the household, pointed out with due impressive-
ness to friends and casual visitors.
But more important is the Monthly Circular, now a recognised
feature in most of the large Unions. Here the member feels
himself brought into direct contact with the outside world of his
trade. Has he been ill or out of work and drawn relief, his name
and the amount of money drawn are duly recorded. H he has
not himself been so unfortunate, he here leams the names of
those who have, and perhaps hears from this source for the first
time of such a calamity having befallen some friend in another
and distant town. Here also are reports of the state of trade and
the number of unemployed in every place where a branch of the
Society exists ; of alterations in hours and rates of wages effected
during the month, by friendly negotiations or by a lock-out or a
strike. Finally, there are letters from lodges or from individual
"On the Road" 451
members on all sorts of topics, including spicy abuse of the
Central Executive, and tart rejoinders from the General Secretary.
As his interest in the Society increases, our artisan himself writes
letters to the Circular, explaining some grievance, suggesting a
remedy for some grievance already explained, or answering criti-
cisms upon the conduct and pohcy of his District Committee or
his Lodge.
In addition to the Monthly Circular there is the Annual
Report. This is a large volume of some hundreds of pages, con-
taining, in a summarised form, the progress and doings of the
Society for the whole year, with the total income and expenditure
and the balance in hand, the proportionate cost of all the various
benefits, a statement of the accounts of each branch, and many
other figures of interest and importance. He feels a glow of
pride as the growth of his Society in funds and members is
recorded, and perhaps also a longing to see his own name printed
as one of the officers of one of the Lodges, and thus be even
distantly associated with the success of the Society.
But after a year or two of the comparative freedom of the
joume5Tnan's life he begins to feel strongly the desire for change
and adventure. The five or seven years' apprenticeship through
which he has just passed has kept him chained in one place, and
a period of unrest now begins. Moreover, he has heard as a
commonplace among his fellow-workmen, that no man knows
his own abihty or what he is worth until he has worked in more
towns or shops than one. They have also expatiated to him
upon the dehghts of " the road " ; and finally he determines to
take advantage of his membership of the Society to go on tramp
on the first opportunity. He is therefore not altogether dis-
pleased when some temporary contraction in his trade causes
his employer to turn him adrift, and thus gives him a right to
draw his travelling card.^
At the close of his first day's tramp, footsore and weary, he
seeks the pubhc-house at which the local Lodge is held, and
having refreshed himself, starts off to find the Secretary. To
him he presents his tramp card. When, on examination, the
dates upon it are found to be correct, and the distance traversed
^ The travelling card, formerly called a " blank," is now, in most cases,
a small book of receipt forms. On it is recorded the particulars of his
membership, and the date to which he has paid his contributions. Along
with it he receives a complete list of the pubUc-houses which serve as the
Society's Lodge-houses, and also a list of the names and addresses of the
Lodge secretaries.
452 The Trade Union World
is sufficient to entitle the traveller to the full benefit of sixpence
and a bed, the Secretary writes an order to the publican to provide
this relief. The date and place are then clearly marked on the
travelling card, and the Secietary retains the corresponding half
of the receipt form to serve as his own voucher for the expendi-
ture. Should he know of any suitable situation vacant in the
town, he will tell the tramp to repair there in the morning. But
if no such post offers itself, the wayfarer must start off again in
the morning, in time to arrive before night at the next Lodge
town, at which alone he can receive any further relief.
If our friend takes to the road during the summer months and
finds a situation within a few weeks, he will have had nothing
worse than a pleasant holiday excursion. But if his tramp falls
during the winter, or if he has to remain for months on the move,
he will be in a pitiable plight. Whilst he is in the thickly-
populated industrial districts, where " relief towTis " in his trade
are frequently to be met with, he finds his supper and bed at the
end of every fifteen or twenty miles. But as he one by one
exhausts these towns, he will, by the rule forbidding rehef from
the same Lodge at less than three months' interval, be compelled
to go further afield. He presently finds the Lodges so far apart
that it is impossible for a man to walk from one to another in a
day. The relief afforded becomes inadequate for his maintenance,
and many are the shifts to which he has to resort for food and
shelter. Finally, after a specified period, usually three months,
his card " runs out " ; he has become " box-fast," and can draw
no more from the Society until he has found a job, and resumed
payment of his contributions.
But our artisan, being an able-bodied young craftsman, has
found a job. Settled in a new town, his tramping for the present
at an end, and himself recovered from the evils, moral and
physical, which that brief period has wrought upon him, his
interest in his Society revives. He attends his new Lodge
regularly, at first because it is the only place in the town where
he meets friends. Presently his old desire to figure as an official
of the Society returns to him. He cultivates the acquaintance of
the officers of the Lodge, mixes freely with the members, and
takes every occasion to speak on exciting questions. At the next
election he is appointed to some minor post, such as auditor
or steward. He makes himself useful and popular, and in the
course of the year finds liimself a member of the Lodge Com-
mittee.
From membership of the Branch Committee he succeeds to
The Branch Secretary 453
the position of Branch Secretary, the highest to which his fellow-
tradesmen in his owTi to\vn can elect him. On the night of the
election he is somewhat surprised to find that there is no keen
competition for the post. The pay of a Branch Secretary is
meagre enough — from ten to fifty shillings per quarter. Most of
his evenings and part of his Sundays are taken up with responsible
clerical work. Besides attending the fortnightly or weekly com-
mittee meeting, lasting from eight to eleven or twelve at night,
he has to prepare the agenda for the special and general meetings
of the members, conduct the whole correspondence of the Lodge,
draw up reports for the District Committee and Central Executive,
keep the accounts, and prepare elaborate balance-sheets for the
head office. Even his working day is not free from official duties.
At any moment he may be called out of his shop to sign the card
of a tramp, or he may have to hurry away in the dinner-hour to
prevent members striking a shop without the sanction of the
Lodge. WTien a deputation is appointed to wait on an employer,
he must ask for a day off, and act as leading spokesman for the
men. All this involves constant danger of dismissal from his
work, or even boycott by the employers, as an " agitator." Nor
will he always be thanked for his pains. Before he was elected
to the Secretaryship, he was probably " hail, fellow, well met "
with all the other members. Now he has constantly to thwart
the wishes and interests of individual members. He must be
always advising the Committee to refuse benefits to members
whose cases fall outside the Rules of the Society, and counseUing
Lodge meetings to refuse to sanction strikes. Hence he soon
finds Uttle cUques formed among the malcontents, who bitterly
oppose him. He is charged with injustice, pusillanimity,
treachery, and finally with being a " master's man." But after
a while, if he holds steadfastly on his course, and abides strictly
to the Rules of the Society, he finds himself backed up by the
Executive Committee, and gaining the confidence of the shrewd
and sensible workmen who constitute the bulk of the members,
and who can always be called up to support the officers in Lodge
meetings.
One of the duties or privileges thrust on our Secretary is that
of representing his trade on the local Trades Council. He is not
altogether gratified to find that the Branch has elected, as his co-
delegates, some of the more talkative and less level-headed of its
members. Some older and more experienced men dechne to serve,
on the ground that they have no time, and " have seen enough of
that sort of thing." Nevertheless our Secretary at the outset
454 ^^'^' Trade Union World
takes his position very seriously. To the young Trade Unionist
the Trades Council represents the larger world of labour politics,
and he has visions of working for the election of labour men on
the local governing bodies, and of being himself run by the
Trades Council for the School Board, or the Town Council, or
perhaps even for Parliament itself. When the monthly meeting
of the Council comes round, he therefore makes a point of
arriving punctually at eight o'clock at the Council Chamber. He
finds himself in the large and gaudily decorated assembly room,
over the bar of one of the principal pubhc-houses of the town.
A low platform is erected at one end, with chairs and a small
table for the Chairman and Secretary. Below the platform is
placed a long table at which are seated the reporters of the local
newspapers, and the rest of the room is filled with chairs and
improvised benches for the delegates. Here he meets the thirty
or sixty delegates of the other Unions. He notices with regret
that the salaried officials of the Societies which have their head-
quarters in the town, and the District Delegates of the great
national Unions who are located in the neighbourhood — the very
men he hoped to meet in this local " Parliament of Labour " — are
conspicuous by their absence. The bulk of the delegates are
either branch officials like liimself, or representatives of the rank
and file of Trade Unionism hke his colleagues. The meeting
opens quietly with much reading of minutes and correspondence
by the Secretary. Then come the trade reports, delegate after
delegate rising to protest against some encroachment by an
employer, or to report the result of some negotiations for the
removal of a grievance. A few questions may perhaps be asked
by the other delegates, but there is usually no attempt to go into
the merits of the case, the Council contenting itself with gi\ing
a sympathetic hearing, and applauding any general denunciation
of industrial tyranny. If a strike is in progress, the delegates of
the trade concerned ask for " credentials " (a letter by the Secre-
tary of the Council commending the strikers to the assistance of
other trades), and even appeal for financial assistance from the
Council itself. This brings about difference of opinion. The
whole Council has applauded the strike, but when it comes to
the question of a levy, the representatives of such old-established
Unions as the Compositors, Engineers, Masons, and Bricklayers
get up and explain that the Rules of their Societies do not allow
them to pledge themselves. On the other hand, the enthusiastic
delegates from a newly-formed Labour Union promptly promise
the assistance of their Society, and vehemently accuse the Council
The Trades Cotmcil 455
of apathy. Then follows a still more serious business — a com-
plaint by one of the several Unions in the engineering or building
trades that the members of a rival Union have lately " black-
legged " their dispute. The delegates from the aggrieved Society
excitedly explain how their men had been withdrawn from a
certain firm which refused to pay the Standard Rate, and how,
almost immediately afterwards, the members of the other Society
had accepted the employer's terms and got the work. Then the
delegates from the accused Society with equal warmth assert that
the work in question belonged properly to their branch of the
trade ; that the members of the other Society had no business to
be doing it at all ; and that as the employers offered the rates
specified in their working rules, they were justified in accepting
the job. At once an angry debate ensues, in which personal
charges and technical details are bandied from side to side, to the
utter bewilderment of the rest of the members. In vain the
Chairman intervenes, and appeals for order. At last the Council,
tired of the wrangle, rids itself of the question by referring it to a
Committee, and an old member of the Council whispers to our
friend a fervent hope that the Committee will shirk its job, and
never meet, since its report would please neither party, and
probably lead to the retirement of one if not both trades from
the Council.
The next business brings the Council back to harmony. The
delegates appointed at the last meeting to urge on the Town
Council or the School Board the adoption of a " fair wage
clause" now give in their report. They describe how Mr.
Alderman Jones, a local pohtician of the old school, talked about
wanton extravagance and the woes of the poor ratepayer ; and
the Council will be moved to laughter at their rejoinder, " How
about the recent increase in the salary of your friend, the Town
Clerk ? " They repeat, with pleasure, the arguments they used on
the deputation, and their final shot, a bold statement as to the
number of Trade Unionists on the electoral register, is received
\\ith general applause. But in spite of all this they report that
Alderman Jones has prevailed, and the Town Council has rejected
the clause. Our new member notes with satisfaction that the
Council is not so ineffective a body as he has been fearing. Alter
a good deal of excited talk the Secretary is instructed to write to
the local newspapers explaining the position, and calling attention
to the example set by other leading municipalities. The members,
new and old alike, undertake to heckle the retiring Town Coun-
cillors who voted against the interests of labour ; and the best
456 The Trade Union World
men of the Council, to whichever political party they belong, join
in voting for a Committee to run Trade Union candidates against
their most obdurate opponents.
Passing, rejecting, or adjourning resolutions, of which notice
has been given at a previous meeting, takes up the remainder of
the evening. First come propositions submitted on behalf of the
Executive Committee, composed of five or seven of the leading
men in the Council. The Secretary explains that an influential
member of the Trade Union Congress Parliamentary Committee
has intimated that if they want a certain measure passed into law,
they had better carry a particular resolution, which is thereupon
read to the meeting. It is briefly discussed, carried unanimously,
and handed to the reporters, the Secretary being ordered to send
copies to the local M.P.'s and possibly to the Cabinet Minister
concerned. Resolutions by other members are not so easily dis-
posed of. The delegate from the Tailors, a fanatical adherent of
the Peace Society, proposes a strong condemnation of increased
armaments, ending up with a plea for international arbitration.
But the engineer and the shipwright vehemently object to the
resolution as impracticable, and one of them moves an amendment
calling on the Government to find employment for hardworking
mechanics in times of industrial depression by building additional
ironclads. The Socialist Secretary of a Labour Union submits a
resolution calling on the Town Council to open municipal work-
shops for the unemployed — a project which is ridiculed by the
Conservative compositor (who is acting also as one of the re-
porters). During the debate the Chairman, Secretary, and
Executive Committeemen he low and say notliing, allowing
the discussion to wander away from the point. The debate
drops, and if a vote on a popular but impracticable resolution
becomes imminent, some " old Parliamentary hand " suggests its
adjournment to a fuller meeting. For the next few evenings our
friend finds all this instructive and interesting enough. Before
the year is up he has realised that, except on such simple issues as
the Fair Wages Clause, and the payment of Trade Union wages
by the local authorities, the crowded meeting of tired workmen,
unused to official business, with knowledge and interest strictly
limited to a single industry, is useless as a Court of Appeal, and
ineftective even as a joint committee of the local trades. At the
best the Council becomes the instrument, or, so to speak, the
sounding-board, of the experienced members, who are in touch
witli tlie Trade Union Parliamentary leaders, and who (at a pay
of only a few sliillings a quarter) conduct ail the correspondence
opening a New Branch 457
and undertake all the business which the Trade Unions of the
towTi have really in common.
But our friend receives a sudden check in his career. One
pay-day he is told by his employer that he will not be wanted
after next week. It may be that he has had some words with the
foreman. over a spoilt job, or that he has been making himself too
prominent in Trade Union work, or simply that his employer's
business is slack. But whatever the cause he is discharged, and
must seek employment elsewhere. At once he declares himself
on the funds of the Society, sending notice to the President and
Treasurer of his position and signing the out-of-work book at
the club daily, hke any other unemployed member. For the next
two or three weeks he tramps from shop to shop in his district
seeking work, and eagerly scans the daily papers in hopes of
finding an advertisement of some vacant situation. Then comes
the news from a friend of a vacancy in a distant town. He resigns
his position as Secretary of the Lodge, draws the balance of
out-of-work pay due to him, and departs regretfully from the
to\\ai where he has made so many friends to start upon a new
situation.
On arriving at his new place he is surprised to find that there
is no branch of his Society in the town. There are a few odd
members, but not enough to support a branch — hence they send
their contributions to the nearest Lodge town. As soon as he
has settled down he takes steps to alter this. In his own work-
shop he argues and cajoles the men into a behef in Trade
Unionism. At night he frequents their favourite haunts, and by
dint of argument, promises and appeals, finally gets enough of
them to agree to join a Lodge to make it worth while opening one
in the town. He forthwith communicates with the Central
Executive Committee, and they, knowing his previous work,
appoint him Secretary pro tern. A meeting of aU the trade is
then called by handbills sent round to the shops, and posted in
the men's favourite public-houses. On the eventful night the
General Secretary and perhaps another Central officer, come down
to the town. They bring a Branch box containing sets of Rules
and cards of membership, a fuU set of cash and other books, a
number of business papers, and even a bottle of ink — in fact ^aU
that is needful to carry on the business of a Lodge. The room
will be crammed full of the men in the trade interested in hear-
ing what the Society is and what it wants to do. Speeches are
made, the advances of wages and reduction of hours gained by the
Society are enumerated, the friendly benefits are explained, and
Q2
458 The Trade Ujtion World
instances are given of men disabled from working at their trade,
receiving ^Tioo accident benefit from the Society, and setting up
in a small business of their own. Then the General Secretary
opens the Lodge, and entrance fees and contributions are paid by
a large number of those present, and the meeting changed from a
public to a private one. Officers are elected, our friend again
finds himself chosen as Secretary, a friendly foreman accepts the
post of Treasurer, while the other old members present at the
meeting are elected to the remaining offices. Addresses from the
Central officials start the Lodge on its way, and the meeting
breaks up at a late hour with cheers for the Societ}' and the
General Secretary.
Within the next three months the Branch Secretary finds that
all that glitters is not gold. At least half of those who joined at
the beginning have lapsed, and at times the branch looks like
collapsing altogether. But by dint of much hard work, persua-
sion, and perhaps the formation of friendships, it is kept together
until a time of prosperity for the trade arrives. This is the
Secretary's opportunity to make or break his Lodge, and being a
wise man he takes it. He puts a resolution on the agenda paper
for the next Lodge meeting in favour of an advance of wages, or
a reduction of hours, or both. The next meeting carries it
unanimously, and it at once becomes the talk of the whole trade
in the town. Men flock down and join the club in order to
assist and participate in the proposed improvements. Then the
Secretary appeals to the General Executive for permission to ask
for the advance. They consider the matter seriously, and want
to know what proportion of the men in the towii are members,
and how long they have been so ; what is the feeling of the non-
Unionists towards the proposed movement, and whether there is
any local fund to support non-Unionists who come out, or buy
off tramps and strangers who come to the town during the
probable strike. All these questions being more or less satisfac-
torily answered, permission to seek the improvement is at length
given, and now comes the Secretary's first taste of " powder " in
an official capacity.
During this agitation the number of members in the Lodge has
been steadily increasing, until it comes to include a good propor-
tion of the trade in the town. The non-Unionists have also
been approached as to their willingness to assist the movement,
and the bulk of them readily agree to come out with the Society
men if these undertake to maintain them. A special Committee
is formed to conduct the " Advance Movement," including
Organising a Strike 459
delegates from the non-Society shops prepared to strike. A
local levy is put on the members of the Lodge, in order to form
a fund from which to pay such strike expenses as may not be
charged to the Union. At length all is ready, and our Secretary
is instructed to serve notices upon all the employers in the
towTi, asking for the advance in wages or the reduction of hours
claimed by the men.
Meanwhile the employers have not been idle. They have
heard rumours of the coming storm and have met together and
consulted as to what should be done, and have formed a more or
less temporary association to meet the attack. Upon receiving
the notices from the mefn's Secretary they invite a deputation of
the men to wait upon them and discuss the matter. To this the
men of course agree, and on the appointed night the Secretary
and the " Advance Committee " appear at the joint meeting. The
leading employer having been elected to the chair, asks the men
to open their case for an advance of wages and reduction of hours.
This they do, emphasising the facts that wages are lower and hours
longer here than in the same trade in neighbouring towns ; that
the cost of living is increasing ; and that some men are always
unemployed who would be absorbed by the proposed change.
The employers retort by urging the smallness of their profits and
the difficulty of securing orders in competition with other towns
where wages are even less than they are here ; and also by
urging that the cost of hving is decreasing and not increasing —
an assertion which they support by statements of the price of
various articles at different times compared with the present.
The men's Secretary has as much as he can do to keep his men
in order. The new members — the " raw heads " of the Com-
mittee— are almost hoping that the employers will not agree,
for to them a strike means merely a few weeks' " play," at the
expense of the Union. And the ordinary workman is so httle
used to discussing A\ith his adversaries that any statement of the
other side of the case is apt to arouse temper. The employers,
too, unaccustomed to treating ^^ith their men, and still feeling it
somewhat derogatory to do so, are not inchned to mince matters,
or smooth over difficulties. Hence the meeting becomes noisy ;
discussion turns into recrimination ; and the conference breaks
up in confusion.
Meanwhile the Central Executive has watched mth anxiety
the approach of a dispute which will involve the Union in expense,
and end possibly in defeat. The General Secretary, accompanied
by one of the Executive Council, appears on the scene, and
460 The Trade Union World
endeavours to mediate. But as the town has been a non-Union
one, the employers refuse to see any but their own v/orkmen, and
thus lose the chance of the very moderate compromise which the
General Secretary is almost sure to offer. This slight to their
Official naturally incenses the local Unionists, and on the follow-
ing Saturday, when their notices have expired, they " pick up "
their tools as they leave the works and the strike is begun.
Then follows a period of intense excitement and hard work for
the men's officials. The employers advertise in all directions for
men at " good wages " to take " steady employment," and counter
advertisements are inserted giving notice of the strike. All the
streets are closely picketed by men, who take it in turns to do duty
in twos and threes outside a factory or workshop for so many
hours each day ; pickets are sent to meet all trains, and by dint
of promises, bribes, and appeals to their " manliness and brother-
hood," workmen who have been attracted to the town by the
emploj'crs' advertisements are induced to depart. Perhaps a few
" blacks " may escape their vigilance and get into some shop.
Every time they come o,ut they are followed and urged to abandon
their dirty calling and join their fellows in the good work.
Some give way, and their fares are at once paid to the place whence
they came. Subscription boxes and sheets are sent out to raise
the funds necessary for the extra expenses, which must not be
taken from the Society's funds. If the strike drags on for many
weeks delegates go from town to town addressing meetings of
Trade Unions and Trades Councils sohciting aid, and usually
succeed in getting a good deal more than their own expenses, the
surplus being remitted to the Lodge. There are the non-Unionists
who have come out on strike to be supported ; " blacks " to bribe
and send away ; printing and delivering of bills and placards to
be paid for, and numerous other subsidiary expenses to be met,
all of which must be defrayed from the local fund.
But even the most protracted strike comes to an end. If trade
is good and the men are well organised, the employers will not
have succeeded in getting any good workmen, and not even
sufficient bad ones, to continue their works, and their plant and
reputation are alike suffering from unskilled workmanship. So
one by one they give in, and accept the men's terms, until at
length the men are again at work. On the other hand, if
business be slack the strike may end in another way. One by
one the employers obtain enough men of one sort or another to
carry out what orders they have in hand. As week succeeds
week the strikers lose heart, until at last the weak ones suddenly
A New Trades Council 461
return to work at the old terms. The officers and committeemen
and a few dogged fighters may remain out, hoping against hope
that something will turn up to make the employers give in.
But the Central Executive wiU probably object to the continued
drain of strike-pay, and may presently declare the strike closed.
This will cause some little resentment among the local stalwarts,
but the strike-pay being now at an end, those who are still
unemployed must tramp off to another town in search of work.
If the strike results thus in failure the newly formed Lodge will
soon disappear and the men in the trade remain unorganised until
the advent of another leader of energy and abihty. But if it has
resulted in victory the prosperity of the Lodge is assured. The
workmen in the trade flock to the support of an institution which
has shown such practically beneficial results. Meanwhile the
Secretary, to whom most of the credit is due, begins to be known
throughout the trade, and spoken of as the man who changed
such and such a place from a non-Union to a Union town.
Short eulogistic notices of his career appear in the Monthly
Circular, and thus the way is paved for his future advancement.
Having thus succeeded in organising his own trade, he finds
an outlet for his energies in doing the same for others in his town.
Perhaps there are other branches of his own industry without
organisations, and if so he begins among them exactly the same
work as he pursued among his own members. When the time
is ripe a meeting is called and a branch of the society, which em-
braces the particular body of men, opened, and he accepts the post
of President to help it along until its members have gained some
experience. Then he will begin again with other trades and go
through the same process, and thus in the course of time succeed
in turning a very bad Trade Union town into a very good one.
When that is accompHshed he determines to start a Trades
Council. He attends meetings of all the Unions and branches in
the town and explains the objects and urges the importance of
such a body. He writes letters to the local Press, and agitates
among his own personal following until his object is well adver-
tised. Finally a joint meeting of delegates from the majority of
the local societies and branches is got together. The Rules of a
neighbouring Trades Council are discussed and adopted, and at
length a Trades Council is definitely estabhshed, if only by the
two or three branches which he has himself organised. He is of
course appointed its Secretary, and gradually by hard work, and
perhaps b}^ successfully agitating for some concession to labour
by the Town Council or local School Board, he wins the approval
462 The Trade Union World
of all the societies, and the Council then becomes a thoroughly
representative body. As Secretary of a newly established Trades
Council he becomes rapidly well known. He is in constant request
as a speaker in both his own and neighbouring towns ; and
he is sent to the Trade Union Congress and instructed to move
some resolution of his own drafting. But as the work gradually
increases, our friend, who has all the time to be earning a
livelihood at his trade, finds that he must choose between the
Trades Council and his own Lodge. Through the Trades Council
he can become an influential local pohtician, and may one day
find himself the successful " Labour Candidate " for the School
Board or the Town Council, But this activity on behalf of labour
generally draws him ever further away from the routine duties
of Branch Secretary of a National Society, and he will hardly
fail to displease some of the members of his own trade. He may
therefore prefer to resign his Secretaryship of the Trades Council,
take a back seat in politics, and spend all his leisure in the work
of his own Society, with the honourable ambition of eventually
becoming one of its salaried officers. In this case he not only
conducts the business of his Lodge with regularity, but also
serves on the District Committee. Presently, as the most
methodical of its members, he will be chosen to act as its Secretary,
and thus be brought into close communication with the Central
Executive, and with other branches and districts.
All this constitutes what we may call the non-commissioned
officer's service in the Trade Union world, carried out in the
leisure, and paid for by the hour, snatched from a week's work at
the bench or the forge. But now the fame of our Secretary and
his steady work for the Society have spread throughout the
district, and when it is decided to appoint a District Delegate
with a salary of £2 or £2 : los. per week, many branches request
him to run for the post. His personal friends and supporters
among them raise an election fund for him, and for a few weeks
he dashes about his district and attends all the branch meetings
to urge his candidature upon the members. Finally the votes are
taken in the Lodges by ballot and sent to the general office to be
counted, and he finds himself duly elected to the post. Again he
moves his home, this time to some central town, so that he can
visit any part of his district with ease and rapidity. His district
stretches over three or four counties, and includes many large
industrial centres, and he finds himself fully occupied. Let us
see how he spends his days, and what is the work he will do for
his Society.
A District Delegate 463
/
Every morning he receives a whole batch of letters on Society
business. The General Secretary orders him immediately to
\-isit one of the branches in his district and inspect the books, a
report having reached the office of some irregularity. A Branch
Secretary telegraphs for him to come over at once and settle a
dispute which has broken out with an important firm. Another
writes asking him to summon a mass meeting of the trade in the
district to take a vote for or against a general strike against some
real or fancied grievance. The Secretary of the Employers'
Association in another town fixes an appointment with him to
discuss the piecework prices for a new sort of work. Finally the
Secretary of his District Committee instructs him to attend a joint
meeting which they have arranged with the District Committee
of another Union to settle a difficult question of overlap or
apportionment of work between the members of the two societies.
Our friend spends the first half an hour at his correspondence,
fixes a day for a special audit of the accounts of the suspected
branch, drops a hasty Une to the General Secretary informing him
of his whereabouts for the next few days, and writes to the
Branch Secretary strongly objecting to the proposed mass
meeting to vote on a strike on the ground that " an aggregate
meeting is an aggravated meeting," and appointing, instead, a
day for a small conference of representatives from the different
branches. Then he is off to the railway station so as to arrive
promptly on the scene of the dispute just reported to him.
Here he finds that a number of his members have peremptorily
struck work and are hanging about ,the gates of the works. He
will half persuade, half order them to instantly resume work,
whilst he goes into the office to seek the employer. If it is a
" Society shop " in a good Trade Union district he is heartily
welcomed, and the matter is settled in a few minutes. The next
train takes him to the neighbouring town, where he spends two
or three hours with the Employers' Secretary, using all his wits
to manipulate the new prices in such a way as at least to main-
tain, if not to increase, the weekly earnings of his members. In
the evening he has to be back at the centre of his district,
thrashing out, in the long and heated debate of a joint meeting,
the difficult question of whose job the work in dispute between
the two Unions properly is, and what constitutes a practical line
of demarcation between the two trades. Thus he rushes about
from day to day, finishing up at night with writing reports on the
state of trade, organisation, and other matters to the Executive
Committee sitting at the headquarters of his Union.
464 The Trade Union World
He has now been for many years the devoted servant of his
fellow-workmen, re-elected at the end of each term to his post of
District Delegate. Upon the removal by resignation or death of
the General Secretary he is pressed on all sides to put up for the
post. The members of the District Committee, and all the
secretaries of the local branches, urge on him his fitness, and the
advantages the district will derive from his election as General
Secretary. Again a committee of his friends and supporters
raises a fund to enable him to travel over the whole country and
visit and address all the branches of the Society. Meanwhile the
Executive Committee prepares for the election of the new
General Secretary. At the removal of the late head officer the}'
at once meet to appoint one of their number to carry on the
duties pro tern., and to issue notices asking for nominations for
the post (generally confined fo members who have been in the
Society a certain number of years and are not in arrears with
their subscriptions) . Printed lists of candidates are f orthv\ith sent
to the branches in sufficient numbers to be distributed to all the
members. A ballot-box is placed in the club-room, the election
standing over at least two meeting nights in order to allow every ^
member full opportunity to record his vote. The boxes are
then sent from the branches to the central office, where the
members of the Executive Committee count the papers and
declare the result.
Our District Delegate having been declared duly elected to
the post of General Secretary is again compelled to remove.
This time it is to one of the great cities — London, Manchester,
or Newcastle — the headquarters of his Society. He is now
entitled to a salary ranging from £200 to £300 per annum, and
has attained the highest office to which it is in the power of Ms
fellow-tradesmen to appoint him. We will there leave Mm to
enjoy the dignity and influence of the position, to struggle
through the laborious routine work of a central office, and to
discover the new difficulties and temptations wMch beset the life
of the general officer of a great Trade Union.
The foregoing narrative gives us, in minute detail, the
inner life of Trade Union organisation of thirty years ago.
But this picture, on the face of it, represents the career of
an officer, not a private soldier, in the Trade Union anny.
Nor must it be supposed that the great majority of the
million and a half Trade Unionists rendered, even as privates,
Trade Unio7i Membership 465
any active service in the Trade Union forces. Only in the
crisis of some great dispute do we find the branch meetings
crowded, or the votes at all commensurate with the total
number of members. At other times the Trade Union
appears to the bulk of its members either as a political
organisation whose dictates they are ready to obey at
Parliamentary and other elections, or as a mere benefit
club in the management of which they do not desire to take
part. In the long intervals of peace during which the con-
stitution of the Society is being slowly elaborated, the
financial basis strengthened, the poUtical and trade poUcy
determined, less than a half or perhaps even a tenth of the
members will actively participate in the administrative and
legislative work. Practically the whole of this minority
will, at one time or another, serve on branch committees or
in such minor offices as steward, trustee, auditor or sick-
visitor. These are the members who form the sohd nucleus
of the branch, always to be relied on to maintain the
authority of the committee. From their ranks come the
two principal branch officers, the President and the Secre-
tary, upon whom the main burden of administration falls.
Though never elected for more than one year, these officers
frequently remain at their posts for many terms in succes-
sion ; and their offices are in any case filled from a narrow
circle of the ablest or most experienced members.
Besides the active soldiers in the Trade Union ranks,
to be counted by hundreds of thousands, we had therefore,
in 1892, a smaller class of non-commissioned officers made
up of the Secretaries and Presidents of local Unions, branches
and district committees of national societies, and of Trades
Councils. Of these we estimate that there were, in 1892,
over 20,000 holding office at any one time. These men form
the backbone of the Trade Union world, and constitute the
vital element in working-class politics. Dependent for their
livelihood on manual labour, they retain to the full the
workman's sense of insecurity, privation, and thwarted
aspirations. Their own singleness of purpose, the devotion
466 The Trade Union World
with which they serve their fellows in laborious offices with
only nominal remuneration, and their ingenuous faith in
the indefinite improvement of human nature by education
and better conditions of hfe, all combine to maintain their
enthusiasm for every kind of social reform. Thus they are
always open to new ideas, provided these are put forward
in a practical shape, by men whose character and intelligence
they respect. This class of non-commissioned officers it is
which has, in the main, proved the progressive element in
the Trade Union world, and which actually determines the
trend of working-class thought. Nevertheless these men
are not the real administrators of Trade Union affairs except
in the little local Unions, run by men working at their
trade, which are fast disappearing. In the great national
and county Unions the branch or lodge officials are strictly
bound down by detailed rules, and are allowed practically
no opportunity of acting on their own initiative. The actual
government of the Trade Union world rests exclusively in
the hands of a class apart, the salaried officers of the great
societies.
This Civil Service of the Trade Union world, non-existent
in 1850, numbered, in 1892, between six and seven hundred.^
Alike in the modern organisation of industry, and in the
machinery of Democratic politics, it was, even in 1892,
taking every day a position of greater influence and im-
portance. Yet if we may judge from the fact that we have
not met with a single description of this new governing
1 We did not include in this figure a large class of men who are
indirectly paid officials of Trade Unions, such as the chcckweighers
among the coal-miners, and the " collectors " among the cotton-weavers,
cardroom-workers, etc. The checkweigher, as we have stated (p. 305),
is elected and paid weekly wages, not by the members of the Trade
Union, but by all the miners in a particular coal-pit. But as Trade
Unionism and the election of a checkweigher are practically coincident,
he frequently serves as lodge secretary, etc. The collectors employed by
certain Trade Unions to go from house to house and collect the members'
contributions are remunerated by a percentage on their collections.
Though not strictly salaried officials, they serve as Trade Union recruiting
agents, as well as intermediaries between members and the central office,
for complaints, appeals, and the circulation of information.
The Trade Union Officer 467
class, the character of its influence, and even its existence,
had hitherto remained almost unobserved. To understand
the part played by this Civil Service, both in the Trade
Union Movement and in the modern industrial State, the
reader must reahse the qualities which the position demands,
the temptations to which its holders are exposed, and the
duties which they are called upon to perform.
The salaried ofhcial of a great Trade Union occupies a
unique position. He belongs neither to the middle nor to
the working class. The interests which he represents are
exclusively those of the manual working class from which he
has sprung, and his duties bring him into constant anta-
gonism with the brain-working, property-owning class. On
the other hand, his daily occupation is that of a brain-worker,
and he is accordingly sharply marked off from the tvpical
proletarian, dependent for his hvehhood on physical toil.
The promotion of a working man to the position of a
salaried brain-worker effects a complete and sudden change
in his manner of hfe. Instead of working every day at a
given task, he suddenly finds himself master of his own time,
with duties which, though laborious enough, are indefinite,
irregular, and easily neglected. The first requisite for his
new post is therefore personal self-control. No greater mis-
fortune can befall an energetic and public-spirited Trade
Unionist, who on occasions takes a glass too much, than to
become the salaried officer of his Union. So long as he is'
compelled, at least nine days out of every fourteen, to put
in a hard day's manual work at regular hours, his propensity
to drink may not prevent him from being an expert crafts-
man and an efficient citizen. Such a man, elected General
Secretary or District Delegate, is doomed, almost inevitably,
to become an habitual drunkard. Instead of being confined
to the factory or the mine, he is now free to come and go
at his own will, and drink is therefore accessible to him
at all hours. His work involves constant travelhng, and
frequent waiting about in strange towns, with Httle choice
of resort beyond the public-house. The regular periods of
468 The Trade Union World
monotonous physical exertion are replaced by unaccustomed
intellectual strain, irregular hours, and times of anxiety and
excitement, during which he will be worried and enticed to
drink by nearly every one he meets. And in addition to
this the habitual drunkenness of a Trade Union official,
though it involves discredit, seldom brings dismissal from
his post. No discovery is more astounding to the middle-
class investigator than the good-natured tolerance with
which a Trade Union will, year after year, re-elect officers
who are well known to be hopeless drunkards. The rooted
dislike which working men have to "do a man out of his
job " is strengthened, in the case of a Trade Union official,
by a generous recognition of the fact that his service of his
fellows has unfitted him to return to manual labour. More-
over, the ordinary member of a Trade Union overlooks the
vital importance of skilled and efficient administration. He
imagines that the drunkenness and the consequent incom-
petency of his General Secretary means only some delay in
the routine work of the office, or, at the worst, some small
malversation of the Society's funds. So long as the cash
keeps right, and the reports appear at regular intervals, it
seems never to occur to him that it is for lack of headship
that his Society is losing ground in all directions, and for-
going, in one week, more than a dishonest Secretary could
steal in a year.
Fortunately the almost invariable practice of electing
the salaried officials from the ranks of the non-commissioned
officers tends to exclude the workman deficient in personal
self-control. The evenings and hoHdays spent in clerical
duties for the branch do not attract the free liver, wliilst the
long apprenticeship in inferior offices gives his fellow-work-
men ample opportunity of knowing his habits. Thus we
find that the salaried officials of the old-established Unions
are usually decorous and even dignified in their personal
habits. An increasing number of them are rigid teetotalers,
whilst many others resolutely refuse, at the risk of personal
unpopularity, all convivial drinking with their members.
The Salaried Official 469
. But another danger — one which would not immediately
have occurred to the middle-class investigator — besets the
workman who becomes a salaried official of his Union.
The following extract, taken from the graphic narrative we
have already quoted, explains how it appears to a thought-
ful artisan :
And now begins a change which may possibly wreck his whole
Trade Union career. As Branch Secretary, working at his trade,
our friend, though superior in energy and abUity to the rank and
file of his members, remained in close touch with their feelings
and desires. His promotion to a salaried office brings him wider
knowledge and larger ideas. To the ordinar}- Trade Unionist the
claim of the workman is that of Justice. He believes, almost as
a matter of principle, that in any dispute the capitaUst is in the
^vrong and the workman in the right. But when, as a District
Delegate, it becomes his business to be perpetually investigating
the exact circumstances of the men's quarrels, negotiating with
employers, and arranging compromises, he begins more and more
to recognise that there is something to be urged on the other side.
There is also an unconscious bias at work. Whilst the points at
issue no longer affect his own earnings or conditions of employ-
ment, any disputes between his members and their employers
increase his work and add to his worry. The former vivid sense
of the privations and subjection of the artisan's life gradually fades
from his mind ; and he begins more and more to regard all com-
plaint's as perverse and unreasonable.
With this intellectual change may come a more invidious
transformation. Nowadays the salaried officer of a great Union
is courted and flattered by the middle class. He is asked to dine
with them, and will admire their well-appointed houses, their fine
carpets, the ease and luxury of their Hves. Possibly, too, liis wife
begins to be dissatisfied. She will point out how So-and-so, who
served his apprenticeship in the same shop, is now well-off, and
steadily making a fortune ; and she reminds her husband that,
had he worked half as hard for himself as he has for others, he
also might now be rich, and living in comfort ^^ithout fear of the
morrow. He himself sees the truth of this. He knows many
men who, with less abihty and energy than himself, have, by
steady pursuit of their o\vn ends, become foremen, managers, or
even small employers, whilst he is receiving only £2 or £4 a
470 The Trade Union World
week without any chance of increase. And so the remarks of
his wife and Jier relations, the workings of his own mind, the
increase of years, a grovsing desire to be settled in life and to see
the future clear before liim and his children, and perhaps also
a little envy of his middle-class friends, all begin insidiously,
silently, unknown even to himself, to work a change in his \news
of life. He goes to live in a little villa in a lower middle-class
suburb. The move leads to his dropping his workmen friends ;
and his wife changes her acquaintances. With the habits of his
new neighbours he insensibly adopts more and more of their
ideas. Gradually he finds himself at issue with his members,
who no longer agree to his proposals with the old alacrity. All
this comes about by degrees, neither party understanding the
cause. He attributes the breach to the influences of a clique of
malcontents, or perhaps to the wild views held by the younger
generation. They think him proud and " stuck-up." over-
cautious and even apathetic in trade affairs. His manner to
his members, and particularly to the unemployed who call for
donation, undergoes a change. He begins to look down upon
them all as " common workmen " ; but the unemployed he
scorns as men who have made a failure of their lives ; and his
scorn is probably undisguised. This arouses hatred. As he
walks to the office in his tall hat and good overcoat, with a smart
umbrella, curses not loud but deep are muttered against liim by
members loitering in search of work, and as these get jobs in
other towns they spread stories of his arrogance and haughtiness.
So gradually he loses the sympathy and support of those ujx)n
whom his position depends. At last the climax comes. A great
strike threatens to involve the Society in desperate war. Un-
consciously biased by distaste for the hard and unthankful work
which a strike entails, he finds himself in small sympathy' with
the men's demands, and eventually arranges a compromise on
terms distasteful to a large section of his members. The
gathering storm-cloud now breaks. At his next appearance
before a general meeting cries of " treachery " and " bribery " are
raised. Alas ! it is not bribery. Not his morality but his intellect
is cornipted. Secure in the consciousness of freedom from out-
ward taint, he faces the meeting boldly, throws the accusation
back in tluir faces, and for the moment carries his point. But
his position now becomes rapidly unbearable. ()n all sides he
finds suspicion deepening into hatred. The members, it is true,
re-elect him to his post ; but they elect at the same time an Execu-
Out of Harmony 471
tive Committee pledged to oppose him in ever}- way.^ All this
time he still fails to understand what has gone wrong, and prob-
ably attributes it to the intrigues of jealous opponents eager for
his place. Harassed on all sides, distrusted and thwarted by his
Executive Committee, at length he loses heart. He looks out
for some opening of escape, and finally accepting a small appoint-
ment, lays down his Secretaryship with heartfelt rehef and
disappears for ever from the Trade Union world.
The Trade Union official who became too genteel for his
post w^as, like the habitual drunkard, an exception. The
average Secretary or District Delegate was too shrewd to
get permanently out of touch with his constituents. Never-
theless the working man who became a salaried officer had
to pick his way with considerable care between the dangers
attendant on the role of boon companion and those in-
separable from the more reputable but more hated character
of the superior person. To personal self-control he had to
add strength and independence of character, a real devotion
to the class from which he had sprung, and a sturdy con-
tempt for the luxury and " gentilit}^ " of those with whom
he was brought in contact. All this remains as true to-day
as it was in 1892, but the general advance in education and
sobriety, and the steady tendency towards an assimilation
of manners among all classes, render the contrasts of the
social nineteenth century daily less marked. The Trade
Union official of 1920 finds it much easier to maintain a
position of self-respecting courtesy both among his own
members and among the employers, officials, and middle-
class politicians with whom he is brought in contact.
We break of^ now to describe, in the following chapters,
the development of the Trade Union Movement from 1890
to 1920, and to discuss some of its outstanding features.
^ We have here another instance of the deeply rooted objection on the
part of workmen to " sack " their officials. A Society will make the life
of an unpopular official unbearable, and will thwart him in every direction ;
but so long as he hangs on he has a safe berth.
-- J CHAPTER IX
'thirty years' growth
[I890-I920]
In 1892, after more than two centuries of development,
Trade Unionism in the United Kingdom numbered, as wq
have seen, little more than a million and a half of members,
in a community approaching forty millions ; or about 4 per
cent of the census population and including possibly 20 per
cent of the adult male manual-working wage-earners. At
the beginning of 1920, as we estimate, the number of Trade
Unionists is well over six millions, in a community that does
not quite reach forty-eight millions ; being over 12 per cent
of the census population and including probably as many as
60 per cent ^ of all the adult male manual- working wage-
' 1 It is doubtful whether, in any country in the world, even in Australia
or Denmark, there is in 1920 so l^rge a proportion of the adult male manual
workers enrolled in Trade Unions as in the United Kingdom ; and —
Ireland being still relatively unorganised industrially — certainly not so
large a proportion as in Great Britain alone.
The Trade Union Movement in Ireland has. apart from the Irish
branches of British Unions, largely concentrated in the Belfast area, Uttle
connection with that in Great Britain, but its progress during the past
thirty years has been scarcely less remarkable. The Irish railwaymen
have abandoned their attempts at organisation in an Irish Union, and
have lately swarmed into the National Union of Railwaymen to the
number of over 20,000. The engineers in Ireland, whether at Belfast
or elsewhere, are, to the number of 9000, in the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers and other British Unions. The other great Unions have
nearly all their Irish branches. But the great transformation has been
in the foundation and remarkable development of the Transport and General
Workers' Union, built up by James Connolly and James Larkin, which
472
TJie Great Expansion 473
earners in the kingdom. With the exception of slight pauses
in 1893-95, 1902-4, and 1908-9, this remarkable growth in
aggregate membership has been continuous during the whole
thirty years.
It is important to notice the continuous acceleration of
this increase. For a few years after the high tide of 1889-92
the aggregate membership dropped slightly. When in 1897
it started to rise again it took a whole decade to add half a
million to the total of 1892-96. Three years more brought
a second, half milhon : a total growth in the eighteen years
from 1892 to 1910 of about a million, or only about 66 per
cent. It then took only three or four years to add another
million ; whilst during the last few years the increase has
not fallen far short of half a million a year, or of the order
• of 10 per cent per annum. Trade Union membership has,
in fact, doubled in the last eight years. ^
has survived both its tremendous DubUn strike of 191 3 and the loss of
both its leaders, and claims in 1920 over 100,000 members in 400 branches,
being half the Trade Unionists in all Ireland. The only other Irish Trade
Unions exceeding 5000 members are the Flax Roughers' Union, included
with other Unions in an Irish Textile Workers' Federation, and the Clerical
Workers' Union, together vnth. the Irish Teachers' Society, which (unlike
the National Union of Teachers in England and the Educational Institute
of Scotland) is frankly afhUated with the (Irish) Labour Party. Scores
of other Irish Trade Unions exist, practically all small, local, and sectional
in character, and almost confined to the ten towns of Dubhn, Belfast,
Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Dundalk, Derry, Clonmel, Sligo, and Kilkenny.
The total Trade Union membership in Ireland, which thirty years ago
was only put at 40,000, may now exceed 200,000, about one-fifth of which
is in and about Belfast. The Irish Trades Union Congress, estabUshed in
1894, and the Irish Labour Party meet annually.
The Irish Trade Union Movement, emerging from handicraftsmen's
local clubs, some of them dating from the middle of the eighteenth century,
and monopolist and sectional in pohcy, has, during the present century,
become fired with nationalist spirit and almost revolutionary fervour.
Its heroes are Michael Davitt, James Connolly, and James Larkin. The
story of the Transport and General Workers' Union, with its extraordinary
extension to all grades of wage-earners all over Ireland, and its sensa-
tional strikes in Dubhn in 1913-14, is an epic in itself. Some idea of this
development may be gathered from The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P.
Ryan, 1919 ; Labour in Irish History, by James Connolly ; Socialism
Made Easy, by the same (about 1905) ; the Annual Reports of the Irish
Trades Union Congress since 1895 ; and those of the Irish Labour Party.
* Statistics of aggregate membership in the past are lacking. But we
474 Thirty Years' Growth
No less significant is the fact that the increase has not
been confined to particular industries, particular localities,
or a particular sex, but has taken place, more or less, over
the whole field. It is common in varying degrees to the
skilled, the semi-skilled, and the unskilled workers. Even
the women, still much less organised than the men, have in
1920 five or six times as many Trade Unionists as they had
thirty years previously ; and have trebled or quadrupled
the then proportion of Trade Union membership to the
adult women manual-working wage-earners. Financially,
too, the Trade Unions have, on the whole, greatly advanced ;
and their aggregate accumulated funds in 1920 (apart from
the assets of their Approved Society sections under the
National Insurance Act) exceed fifteen millions sterling ;
being about ten times as much as in 1890, and constituting
a " fighting fund " unimaginably greater than ever entered
the mind of Gast or Doherty, Martin Jude or William
Newton, or any other Trade Union leader of the preceding
century. It is the stages and incidents of this past thirty
years' growth that we have now to describe. We shall refer
incidentally to half-a-dozen of the more important strikes
of the generation ; but nowadays it is not so much in-
dustrial disputes that constitute landmarks of Trade Union
history as the steps, often statutory or political in
character, by which the Movement advances in public in-
fluence and in a recognised participation in the government
of industry. During the present century, at any rate, the
action of Trade Unionism on legislation, and of legislation
on Trade Unionism, has been incessant and reciprocal.
The growing strength of the Movement has been marked by
a series of legislative changes which have ratified and
legalised the increasing influence of the wage-earners' com-
suggest that after the transient mass enrolments of 1833-34 had lapsed,
the total membership in Great Britain of such Trade Unions as survived
probably did not reach 100,000. It is doubtful whether, as late as i860,
there were half a million Trade Unionists. We give in an Appendix such
past statistics as we have found.
The "Cotton Men" 475
binations in the government both of industry and poUtical
relations. And every one of these statutes — notably the
Trade Disputes Act of 1906, the Trade Boards Act of 1908,
the Coal Mines Regulation (Eight Hours) Act of 1908, the
National Insurance Act of 191 1, the Trade Union Act of
1 9 13, the Com Production Act of 19 17, and the Trade
Boards Extension Act of 1918 — have been marked by
immediate extensions of Trade Union membership and
improvements in Trade Union organisation in the indus-
tries concerned.
During the thirty years which have elapsed since 1890
the progress of the Trade Union Movement, enormous as it
has been, has been accompanied by relatively little change
in the internal structure of the several Unions. \Miat has
occurred has been a marked change in the relative position
and influence of the different sections of the Trade Union
world, and even in its composition. Some sections have
declined relatively to others. Even more significant is the
vastly greater consolidation of the Trade Unionism of 1920
than that of 1890. Not only have many more of the
societies grown into organisations of numerical and financial
strength, but there has also been developed, especially
during recent years, an interesting network of federations
among Unions in the same industry, and often among
cognate or associated industries, some of which, under-
taking negotiations on a national scale for a whole industry,
have become more influential and important than any but
the largest Unions.
The Cotton Operatives.
The most ■ notable of these changes is the dechne in
relative influence of the cotton operatives. It is not that
the Unions of Spinners, Weavers and Cardroom Operatives
have decreased in membership or in accumulated funds. On
the contrary, they have in the aggregate during the past
thirty years more than doubled their membership ; and the
47^ Thirty Years' Growth
Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners,
with three-quarters of a milUon pounds belonging to its
25,000 members (exclusive of 26,000 piecers), is, now as
formerly, the wealthiest Trade Union of any magnitude.
Nor have these Unions in any sense lost their hold on
their own trade, at least in its central district of Lanca-
shire and Cheshire, though its outlying areas in Derbyshire,
Yorkshire, and Glasgow are still somewhat neglected. But
the growth of Trade Unionism in other industries has reduced
the " Cotton Men " from ten or twelve to four or five per
cent of the Trades Union Congress ; and, owing partly to
internal differences, their leading personaUties no longer
dominate the counsels of the Movement. The excellent
organisation of the Cotton Trade Unions has been main-
tained ; but it has not been copied by other trades, and
their internecine dissensions have detracted from the in-
fluence of their various federations. There has been, in
fact, during the whole thirty years, only two or three im-
portant incidents. A general strike of cotton-spinners took
place in 1893, when all the mills were stopped for no less
than twenty weeks. The employers had demanded a re-
duction of 10 per cent, whilst the Trade Union urged that
the depression should be met by placing all the mills on
short time. This stoppage was at last brought to an end
by agreement between the employers and the Trade Union,
arrived at without external intervention in a fourteen hours
continuous session, which made the reduction in rates only
yd. in the £ (2-916 instead of 10 per cent), and included
elaborate arrangements for future adjustment of wages and
other differences by mutual discussion without cessation of
work.i This " Brooklands Agreement," which we described
in our Industrial Democracy, governed the spinning trade
from 1893 to 1905, but was in the latter year formally
terminated by the Unions concerned, on the ground that
the machinery worked both slowly and in such a way as
to hamper the operatives in obtaining the advantage of
* Industrial Democracy, pp. 38, 92, 103, 123, 258, etc.
Complex Organisation 477
good times. Provisional arrangements were made, but these
did not prevent a strike of seven weeks in 1908, which ended
in a compromise advantageous to the operatives. Apart
from minor and local disputes, frequently about bad material
or refusal to work with a non-Unionist, there was, however,
no forward movement, notably with regard to the hours of
labour. In 1902 a sUght amendment of the Factory Act
was secured by agreement with the employers, by which
the factory week was reduced from 56^ to 55^ hours ; and
with this the trade remained contented. Right down to
1919 there was no important trade movement, but in
February of that year all sections of the cotton operatives
claimed their share in the general reduction of hours that
was proceeding ; and, after prolonged negotiations, 300,000
operatives struck in June. When it was seen that the
stoppage of the mills had become general, the employers
gave way and conceded a Forty-eight Hours week, which has
not yet been embodied in law, accompanied by a 30 per cent
advance in piece rates so as to involve no reduction of earnings.
The organisation of the cotton operatives, whilst remain-
ing essentially as described in our Industrial Democracy, has
gone on increasing in federal complexity. The various
sections — notably spinners with their attendant piecers ;
weavers, including winders, and in some towns also warpers,
beamers, and reelers ; card, blowing and ring-room opera-
tives ; warp-dressers and warpers ; tape-sizers ; beamers,
twisters and drawers ; and overlookers — continue to be
organised in very autonomous local bodies, which are styled
sometimes societies or associations, and sometimes merely
branches, and which vary in number in the different sections
from half-a-dozen to ten times as many. But these are
nearly all doubly united, first in a federal body for the whole
of each section (wiiich may be styled an amalgamation, a
federation, an association, or a General Union of the section),
and also in a local " Cotton Trades Federation " or " Textile
Trades Federation," which combines the local organisations
of the weavers and sometimes other sections in each of a
478 Thirty Years' Growth
cou})le of 5ozen geographical districts in Lancashire and
Chesliire. The weavers' " amalgamation," and other sec-
tions of the " manufacturing " trade, are further united in
the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association, with
175,000 members. Finally, all the federal organisations
of the several sections are brought together in the United
Textile Factory Workers' Association, which focuses the
opinion of all the cotton operatives, including the Amalga-
mated Association of Bleachers and Dyers, on those funda-
mental issues on which they are conscious of a common
and an equal interest.^
The officials of the Cotton Trade Unions — herein differing
from those of the greatly developed General Union of Textile
Workers, which has organised the (principally women) woollen
weavers — have remained predominantly technicians, devot-
^ The Amalgamated Association of Card and Blowing Room Opera-
tives is (1920) n6t now a member. A further development of federal
complexity is the formation of a Federation of Kindred Trades connected
with the Export Shipping Industry of Manchester.
An invidious feature, in which the textile industry is unique, is the
appearance during the present century, as the result of a quarrel as to
" political action," of half-a-dozen separate local Trade Unions of Roman
Catholic weavers, which are united in what is termed the Lancashire
Federation of Protection Societies. These, which are neither numerous
nor of extensive membership, remain outside the Amalgamated Associa-
tion of Weavers ; and arc watchful critics of any proposals, at the Trades
Union Congress (to which they do not seek admission) or elsewhere, that
offend the Roman Catholic Church (notably any suggestion of " Secular
Education," or educational changes deemed inimical to the Roman Catholic
schools). There is a National Conference of Catholic Trade Unionists
having similar objects.
There was, in 191 9, also a Jewish National Labour Council of Great
Britain ; and from time to time Unions are formed, especially in the
clothing trade (such as the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors, Machinists, and
Pressers, established 1893), and in baking and cabinctmaking, aiming at
enrolling Jewish workers. But this is not really a religious, or even
primarily a racial, cleavage, but merely sectional organisation, usually
transient, among particular branches of industry which happen to be
])rincipall)' carried on by Jews. At present most such societies in the
clothing trade have been absorbed in the United Garment Workers' Trade
Union, which, with upwards of 100,000 members, is actively negotiating
for a merger with the older Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses
(established 1S63) and the effective Scottish Operative Tailors' and
Tailoresses' Assc iation, with 5000 members, under the title of the United
Tailors and Garment Wi)rkers.
Political Slowness 479
ing themselves almost entirely to the protection of their
members' trade interests, without taking much part in the
wider interests now largely influencing the Trade Union
world, and showing httle sympathy either in larger federa-
tions or in the new spirit. They have been slow to take an
active part in the political development of the Trade Union
world, which has manifested itself, as we shall describe in a
subsequent chapter, in the organisation of the Labour
Party. This backwardness may be ascribed, in some degree,
to the pohtical history of Lancashire, where an ancestral
Conservatism still lingers, and where it was possible, even
in the twentieth century, for so prominent a Trade Union
offtcial as the late James Mawdsley, the able leader of
the cotton-spinners, to stand for Parliament in 1906 as a
member of the Conservative Party. The influence of an
exceptionally large proportion of Roman Catholics among
the cotton operatives must also be noted. It is a unique
feature of the technical officials of the Cotton Unions that
they have frequently been wilUng to serve the industry as
the paid officials of , the Employers' Associations when they
have been offered higher salaries. Their main duty, whether
acting for the employers or the workmen, is to secure uni-
formity in the application of the Collective Agreements as
between mill and mill ; and such a duty, it is argued, like
that of the valuer or accountant, is independent of personal
opinion or bias, and can be rendered with equal fidehty to
either client. This was not at first resented by the work-
men, who even saw some advantage in the Employers'
Association being served by officers thorough^ acquainted
with the compHcated technicahties as the operatives saw
them. There has, however, latterly been a change of feeling ;
and though such transfers of services cannot be prevented
(the Employers' Associations constantly finding the Trade
Union official the best man available), they are now resented. ^
^ A recent case in which the Trade Union Assistant Secretary left
the weavers for the employers, in the midst of a crisis, with the Union
affairs in confusion, was stigmatised as desertion.
480 Thirty Years' Growth
It is felt in some quarters that many of the " cotton men "
have fallen out of harmony with the newer currents of
thought in the Trade Union world. It is alleged that they
accept too imphcitly the employers' assumptions, and do not
sympathise with aspirations of more fundamental change
than a variation of wages or hours. But the influence of
the " cotton men " is, in the Trade Union world, still im-
portant for their specific contribution, to Trade Union theory
and practice, of equal piecework rates for both sexes ; of
a rigid refusal to aUow an employer to make the inferiority
either of any workers or of any machines that he chooses to
employ an excuse for deductions from the Standard Rate,
and of the utmost possible improvement of machinery so
long as the piecework rates are strictly controlled by
Collective Bargaining and firmly embodied in rigidly enforced
lists — points on which many Trade Unionists who would
deem themselves " advanced " have not yet attained the
same level. ^
^ The workers in the woollen and worsted trades, whose organisation
went to pieces early in the nineteenth century on the extensive introduc-
tion of women and the successive transformations of the industry by
machinery, have, during the past thirty years, developed extensive Trade
Unions, which have steadily gained strength. In 1892 we could count
only 18,000 Trade Unionists in the whole industry. In 1920, whilst the
National Society of Woolcombers and Kindred Trades has 12,000 members
and there are strong organisations of wool-sorters, warp-dressers, and over-
lookers, the General Union of Textile Workers, established in 1881, now
includes a membership, in the West of England as well as in Yorkshire,
principally male and female weavers, numbering more than 100,000 {The
Heavy Woollen District Textile Workers' Union, by Ben Turner,- 191 7).
During the war these Unions were accorded equal representation with the
employers and with the Government on the Wool Control Board, by
which the Government suppUes of wool were " rationed " among the
manufacturers, and the prices fixed.
In the dyeing and finishing branch of the textile industry the Amal-
gamated Society of Dyers, Bleachers, Finishers, and Kindred Trades
(established 1878), with 30,000 members, has outstripped the older National
Society of Dyers and Finishers (estabUshed 1851 ; 12,000 members), and
has entered into remarkable agreements with the monopolist combination
of employers. (The Amalgamated Association of Bleachers and Dyers,
centred at Bolton, which has over 22,000 members, occupies a similar
leading position as regards the dyeing of cotton goods.) A recently formed
National Association of Unions in the Textile Trades seeks to co-ordinate
the influence of all the woollen workers and dyers, and counts a member-
The Builders 481
The Building Trades
The Building Trades have lost their relative position in
the Trade Union world to nearly as great an extent as the
cotton operatives. Thirty years ago their representatives
stood for 10 per cent of the Trades Union Congress, whereas
to-day they probably do not represent 3 per cent of its
membership. They have, for a whole generation, supplied
no influential leader. The only large society in this section,
the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters, Cabinetmakers, and
Joiners (133,000 members), has more than doubled its
membership since 1890, drawing in various small societies of
cabinetmakers, and carpenters, but not yet the older General
Union of Carpenters and Joiners, which counts 15,000
members ; and so, too, has the small but sohd United
Operative Plumbers' Society, with 14,000 members — neither
of them, however, commanding the allegiance of anything
hke the whole of its craft. The numerous small societies
of painters have, for the most part, drawn themselves
together in the National Amalgamated Society of Operative
House and Ship Pamters and Decorators (30,000 members) ;
whilst the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades
Association (12,500 members) represents a union of many
small societies. Altogether the Trade Unions in the building
trades, including all the Uttle local societies, have probably
done no more than double their membership of 1892, and
the increase has been relatively least in the most skilled
grades. This is due, in part, to an actual dechne in the
trade, the total numbers enumerated in the 1911 census
being actually less than in that of 1901, the fall being even
greater down to 1919, when it was estimated that only seven-
twelfths as many men were at work at building as in 1901.
The story of the Building Trade Unions during the
ship of about 150,000, in 35 societies, which are grouped in four sections
(" Raw Wool," " Managers and Overlookers," " Textile Workers," and
" Dyers' Societies ").
R
482 Thirty Years' Growth
thirty years is one of innumerable small sectional and
local disputes with their employers — talcing the form,
during 19 13, of repeated sudden strikes in the London
area against non-Unionists, forced on by the " hf>t-heads "
and discountenanced by the Executive Committees, and
leading, in 1914, to a general lock-out by the London
Master Builders' Association. The employers demanded
that the Trade Unions should penalise members who struck
without authority, and that the Unions should put up a
pecuniary deposit which might be forfeited when a strike
occurred in violation of the Working Rules, They also
insisted on each workman signing a personal agreement to
work quietly with non-Unionists, under penalty of a fine of
20s. In the lock-out that ensued the whole building trade
of the Metropohs was stopped for over six months. Efforts
at a settlement in June were rejected on ballot of the opera-
tives ; and whilst signs of weakening occurred among the
operatives the National Federation of Building Trade
Employers had decided on a national lock-out throughout
the kingdom in order to secure the employers' terms, when
the outbreak of war brought the struggle to an end, and
work was resumed practically on the old conditions.
During the war, when the bulk of the operatives Were
enrolled in the army, and building was restricted to the
most urgently needed works, disputes remained in abeyance.
At the beginning of 1918 a new start was made in the
organisation of the industry by the estabhshment of a
National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, itself
a development from a previous National Building Trades
Council, in which all the national Trade Unions, 13 in
number, for the first time joined together. Notwithstanding
great differences in numerical strength, the Unions agreed
to constitute the Federation Executive of two representa-
tives from each national union. The Federation is formed
of local branches, each of which is composed of the branches
in the locality of the nationally affiliated Unions, governed
by the aggregate of the " Trades Management Committee "
The " Builders' Parliament " 483
of such branches, acting under the direction and control of
the Federation Executive. A significant new feature,
recalhng an expedient of the Trade Unionism of 1834, is
the estabhshment of " Composite Branches " of individual
building trades operatives in locahties where no branch of
the separate national unions exists. What success may
attend this renewed effort at unified national organisation
of the whole industry it is impossible to predict ; there are
signs of a movement for actual amalgamation. The four
principal Builders' Labourers' Unions are on the point of
uniting in a strong amalgamation with 40,000 members.
Other attempts at amalgamation, including one among the
" house builders," the societies of bricklayers, masons and
plasterers, have been voted. The Furnishing Trades Associa-
tion was only prevented from merging in the Amalgamated
Society of Carpenters by technical difficulties. On the
other hand the separate Scottish and Irish Unions (except
for the merging of the Associated Carpenters) stubbornly
maintain their independence. Down to the present it must
be said that combination in the building trades, torn by
internecine conflicts and financially weakened by unsuccess-
ful strikes, has, on the whole, been falling back. The
gradual change of processes, and the introduction of new
materials, with an actual dechne in the numbers employed,
has not been met by any improvement in the organisation
of the older craft unions, whilst the workers in the new
processes have failed to achieve effective union. With the
great demand for building since the Armistice, the Building
Trades Unions have, however, shown increased vitahty ;
and the position in the negotiating Joint Boards, at which
they are now regularly meeting the employers' representa-
tives, has considerably improved. The latest achievement
of the industry is the estabhshment, jointly with the em-
ployers, of a " Builders' Parhament " — largely at the
instance of Mr. Malcolm Sparkes — ^which is the most note-
worthy example of the " \^^tley Councils," to which we
shall refer later.
484 Thirty Years* Growth
Engineering and the Metal Trades
The large and steadily increasing army of operatives in
the various processes connected with metals (who are com-
bined in Germany in a single gigantic Metal Workers'
Union) can be noticed here only in its three principal
sections, the engineering industry, boilermaking and ship-
building, and the production of iron and steel from the ore.
Trade Unionism in the engineering industry, though it
has, during the past thirty years, greatly increased in
aggregate membership, notably among the unskilled and
semi-skilled workmen employed in engineering shops, can
hardly be said to have grown in strength, whether manifested
in effect upon the engineering employers, who have become
very strongly combined throughout the whole kingdom, or
in influence in the Trade Union world. This relative decline
must be ascribed to the continued lack of any systematic
organisation of the industry as a whole ; to a failure to
cope with the changing processes and systems of remunera-
tion which the employers have introduced ; and to the
persistence of internecine war among the rival Unions
themselves.
The trouble in the engineering world came to a head in
1897, precipitated perhaps by the employers, who wanted,
as they said, to be " masters in their own shops." The
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which had maintained its
predominant position among the engineering workmen, but
only commanded the allegiance of a part of them, after a
series of bickerings with the employers about the technical
improvement of the industry, in which the workmen had
shown themselves, to say the least, very conservative, found
itself involved in a general strike and lock-out in all the
principal engineering centres, nominally about the London
engineering workmen's precipitate demand for an Eight
Hours Day, but substantially over the employers' insistence
on being masters in their own workshops, entitled to intro-
The Engineers 485
duce what new methods of working they chose, and whatever
new systems of remmieration according to results that they
could persuade the several workmen to accept. The Union,
to which apparently it did not occur to use the methods of
pubhcity on which WiUiam Newton and John Burnett
would have reUed, failed to make clear its case to the pubHc ;
and pubhc opinion was accordingly against the engineering
workmen, beUeving them to be at the same time obstructive
to industrial improvements and unable to formulate condi-
tions that would safeguard their legitimate interests. The
result was that the prolonged stoppage, which reduced the
funds of the -A.S.E. down to what only sufficed to meet the
accrued Uabilities for Superannuation Benefit, ended in a
\drtual victory for the employers. The A.S.E. quickly re-
sumed its growth and stood, in the autumn of 1919, at 320,000
members, or over five times its membership of 1892. But the
sectional societies also increased in size, and down to 1919
they counted in the aggregate, as in 1892, about half as
many members as the A.S.E. itself.^ Meanwhile, the great
development of the engineering industry, and the successive
changes in the machinery employed, have been accompanied
by the introduction of various forms of " Pa3rment by
Results," in which the engineering Trade Unions have not
known how to prevent the reintroduction of indi\'idual
bargaining. Owing to its quarrels with the various sectional
societies in the industry, the A.S.E. has been alternately in
and out of the Trades Union Congress ; and, on general
issues, has seldom sought to influence the Trade Union
world as much as its magnitude and position would have
entitled it to do. The same may be said of the other Trade
^ The history of the struggles in the engineering industry may be
gathered from the monthly Journal of the A.S.E. and the Annual Reports
of this and other engineering Trade Unions ; from the references in
Engineering and other employers' periodicals. For the lock-out of 1897,
see also the Times and Labour Gazette for that year, and also an anonymous
volume. The Engineering Strike, 1897. See also for some of the points at
issue, Industrial Democracy, bj'^ S. and B. Webb, 1897 ; An Introduction to
Trade Unionism, by G. D. H. Cole, 1917, and The Works Manager To-day,
by Sidney Webb, 191 8.
486 Thirty Years' Growth
Unions in the engineering industry, which were contented
to hold their own against their greater rival, and to see
their membership progress with the growth of the industry
itself.
The elaborate constitution of the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers, which we described in a preceding chapter,
has been, during the past thirty years, repeatedly tinkered
with by delegate meetings, but without being substantially
changed. There has been a perpetual balance and deadlock
of opinion, which has led to successive modifications and
reactions. Alongside the skilled engineering craftsmen, of
different speciaUties in technique, there has grown up a
vast number of unapprenticed and semi-skilled men, whom
the Union has failed to exclude, not only from the work-
shops but also from the jobs formerly monopoHsed by the
legitimate craftsmen. Should these interlopers be admitted
to membership ? At one delegate meeting (1912) the rules
were altered so as to admit (" Class F ") not only all varieties
of skilled engineering craftsmen, but also practically any one
working in an engineering shop. This was counteracted by
the tacit refusal of most branches to carry out the decision
of their own delegates ; and " Class F," which never obtained
as many as 2000 members, was abohshed by the next
delegate meeting (1915.) The method of remuneration has
been another bone of contention. Especially since the dis-
astrous conflict of 1897, the employers have more and more
insisted on the adoption of systems of " payment by results "
instead of the weekly time rates, to which the engineering
operatives, like those of most of the building trades, de-
votedly cling. What is to be the Union policy with regard
to these varieties of piecework and " premium bonus "
systems ? Faihng to discover any device by which (as
among the cotton operatives, the boot and shoe makers,
and the Birmingham brassworkers) " pajmient by results "
can be effectively safeguarded by being subjected to collec-
tive bargaining, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers has
wavered, in its decisions and in the policy of its various
Rival Unions 487
districts, between (a) refusing to allow any other system
than timework ; (&) limiting systems of payment by results
to " those shops in which they have already been intro-
duced " ; (c) insisting, as a condition of permitting pay-
ment by results, on the " Principle of Mutuality," which
amounts to no more than the claim that the workman shall
not have the piecework rates or " bonus times " arbitrarily
imposed upon him, but shall be permitted individually to
bargain with the foreman or rate-fixer for better terms.
The result is a chaos of inconsistent customs and practices
varying from shop to shop ; and withal, a tendency to a
continuous dechne in piecework rates (mitigated only by
the greater or less extent to which collective " shop bargain-
ing " prevails, and by its efficiency) which leads, in sullen
resentment, to " ca' canny," or slow working. The third
bone of contention has been how to deal with the com-
peting Trade Unions, which are either societies of varieties
of skilled engineers who prefer to remain unabsorbed in the
A.S.E., or societies of new classes of operatives such as
machine workers, workers in brass and copper, electrical
craftsmen, and others, with whom the A.S.E, found itself
disputing the control of the industry. Should these much
smaller organisations be [a) ignored and their members
treated as non-unionists ; or (6) admitted to joint dehbera-
tion and action in trade matters with the view to formulat-
ing a common pohcy ; or (c) dealt with by amalgamation
on a still broader basis than that of the A.S.E. ? It would
be useless to trace the results of the ebb and flow of these
contrary views, which were, in the autumn of 1919, for the
time being, partly reconciled by an agreement by which six
of the competing Unions ^ are in 1920, with the A.S.E.,
^ The Unions which, along with the A.S.E., ratified the agreement
were the Steam Engine Makers' Society, the United Machine Workers'
Association, the United Kingdom Society of Amalgamated Smiths and
Strikers, the Associated Brassfounders and Coppersmiths' Society, the
North of England Brass Turners' Society, and the London United Metal
Turners, Fitters and Finishers, having an aggregate membership of 70,000.
The societies which failed to secure ratification on the members' vote,
in some cases merely by the failure to obtain a sufficiently large poll, were
488 Thirty Years' Growth
to be merged in the Amalgamated Engineering Union with
a membership of 400,000 and accumulated funds amounting
to nearly four milHons sterling. It remains to be seen
whether this wider amalgamation will bring to engineering
Trade Unionism the formulation of a systematic policy,
national organisation, and competent leadership.
Underlying all these issues, and aggravating all the dis-
putes to which they give rise, is the fundamental divergence
between those who insist on an extreme local autonomy —
the district being free to strike, and free to refuse to settle
a local strike, — and those who maintain the importance of
a national unity in trade policy, and the necessity, with
centralised funds, of centralised control. Still more keen
is the controversy between those who wish to maintain the
present craftsmen's organisation, and those who seek to
enlarge it into an organisation comprising all the workers
in the industry, whether skilled or unskilled. During the
past decade the discontent against the Central Executive,
especially on the Clyde, has led to a so-called " rank and
file " movement ; the development of the shop steward
from a mere " card inspector " and membership recruiting
officer into an aggressive strike leader ; and the joining
together of the shop stewards (as at Glasgow, Sheffield, and
Coventry) into such new forms of organisation as the
" Clyde Workers' Committee," actively promoting their
own local trade policies irrespective of the views of the
Union as a whole.
the Amalgamated Toolmakers' Society, the Electrical Trades Union, the
United Brass Founders and Finishers' Association, the Amalgamated
Instrument Makers' Society, the United Pattern Makers' Association, the
Associated Smiths and Strikers, the National Brassworkers and Metal
Mechanics, the Association of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughtsmen,
and the Scale and Beam Makers' Society, with something like 100,000
members in the aggregate. Probably some of these will take another vote
in the near future.
The old-estabhshed Friendly Society of Ironfounders (35,000 members)
continues quite apart, though joining freely in engineering trade move-
ments. An unusually protracted national strike in 1919, which is likely
to end in a compromise, may possibly lead to proposals for closer union.
The Shop Steward 489
The " Shop Stewards' Movement," which assumed some
importance in the engineering industry in 1915-19, was a
new development of an old institution in Trade Unionism —
we have referred elsewhere to the " Father of the Chapel "
among the compositors, and to the checkweighman among
the coal-miners — which acquired a special importance
o\\ing to the growing lack of correspondence between the
membership of the Trade Union Branch or District Council
and the grouping of the workmen in the different establish-
ments, and also from the fact that the workmen in each
establishment found themselves belonging to different
Trade Unions. " The shop steward," it has been pointed
out, " was originally a minor offtcial appointed from the
men in a particular workshop and charged with the duty
of seeing that all the Trade Union contributions were paid.
He had other small duties. But gradually, as the branch
got more and more out of touch with the men in the sh6p,
these men came to look to the official who was on the spot
to represent their grievances. During the war the develop-
ment of the shop steward movement was very rapid, par-
ticularly in the engineering industry'. In some big industrial
concerns, composed of a large nmnber of workshops, the
committees of stewards from the various shops very largely
took over the whole conduct of negotiations and arrange-
ment of shop conditions. Further, a national organisation
of shop stewards was formed, at first mainly for propa-
gandist purposes. The existing unions have considered
some of the activities of shop stewards to be unofficial, and
there has been a good deal of dissension \\ithin the unions
on this score. ♦Attempts have been made to reach an
agreement by which Shop Stewards' Committees shall be
fully recognised at once by the unions and by the manage-
ments. So far there has been no final settlement. An
agreement was made in the early summer of 1919 between
the Engineering Employers' Federation and the Unions ;
how this will work in practice is not yet certain." ^
^ Trade Unionism : a New Model, by R. Page Arnot, 1919 ; and Is
R2
490 Thirty Years' Growth
It must, in fact, be said that although the Engineering
Trade Unions have during the past thirty years not taken
much part in general Trade Union issues, they have (in
contrast with some other sections) contributed freely in
both men and ideas. We have already dwelt upon the
activities of Mr, John Bums and Mr. Tom Mann. We shall
mention the political progress of Mr, George Barnes, who
is also of the A.S.E. ; whilst the Friendly Society of Iron-
founders has given Mr. Arthur Henderson to the Movement,
And, in the long run possibly more important even than
men, the ideas emanating from the engineering workshops
have had a more than proportionate share in the ferment
of these years. The vacancy in the office of General Secre-
tary, occasioned by the election to the House of Commons
of Mr. Robert Young, was filled in the autumn of 1919
by the election of Mr. Tom Mann ; and this election, to-
gether with the great amalgamation of competing Unions
brought about at the same time, may perhaps open up a
new era in engineering Trade Unionism,
In contrast with the failure of Trade Unionism in the
engineering trades either to develop a systematic organisa-
tion or to cope with the changes in processes and methods
of remuneration, the two powerful Unions of boilermakers
and shipwrights have gone from strength to strength,
doubling their numbers, absorbing practically all the re-
maining local societies in their industry, and closely com-
bining with each other in policy and other activities, con-
cluding, indeed, in the autumn of 1919 an agreement to
submit to their respective memberships a proposal- for a
• — — —
Trade Unionism played out ? 1919, by the same. Some " extremist "
thinkers among workmen have put their hopes of achie\nng the " In-
dustrial Democracy " that they desire upon a development of the Shop
Stewards' Movement, which should become, together with a " Works
Committee," the instrument of transferring the management of each
undertaking from its present capitalist owners and directors to the elected
representatives of the persons employed. See The Workers' Committee,
an Outline of its Principles and Structures, by J. T. Murphy (191S), and
Compromise or Independence, an Examination of the Whitley Report (1918),
by the same, both published by the Shefifield Workers' Committee.
'
The Steel Smelters 491
formal amalgamation which may be joined by the strong
society of Associated Blacksmiths. This would mean the
consohdation, in one powerful Union of 170,000 members,
of practically all the skilled craftsmen working in the
construction of the hulls of ships, of boilers and tanks, and
of steel bridge-work of all sorts. Concentrated largely in
the ports of the north-east coast and those of the Clyde,
with strong contingents in the relatively small number of
other shipbuilding centres, the boilermakers and shipwrights
have held their own in face of all the changes in their in-
dustry, and have known how to maintain a fairly uniform
national policy.
Passing from engineering and shipbuilding to the smelt-
ing of the iron and steel from the ore, the one marked
advance in organisation is that of the British Steel Smelters,
which, estabhshed in 1886, and in 1892 having still only
2600 members, had by 1918, under -the prudent leadership
of Mr. John Hodge, drawn to itself over 40,000. The
British steel smelters have the credit of equipping them-
selves \vith the most efficient office in the Trade Union world,
with a real statistical department and a trained staff, in-
cluding, for all their legal business, especially that connected
with compensation for accidents, a quaUfied professional
sohcitor. Already before the outbreak of war a far-seeing
poUcy of amalgamation had been virtually decided on ;
and in 1915 a scheme was prepared for the merging of
all the six important Unions in the industry of obtaining
the metal from the ore, including the operatives in the
tinplate and rolling mills. The plan for surmounting the
legal and other difficulties of amalgamation, of which we
may ascribe the authorship to Mr. John Hodge, Mr. Pugh,
and Mr. Percy Cole, the able officials of the British Steel
Smelters' Union, was one of extreme ingenuity as involving
no more than a bare majority of the members voting, which
deserves the attention of other societies as a " New Model."
Three only out of the six societies (the British Steel
Smelters' Association, the Associated Iron and Steel Workers
492 Thirty Years* Growth
of Great Britain, and the National Steel Workers' Associa-
tion) were able to go forward in 1917/ when a new society,
the British Iron, Steel, and Kindred Trades Association,
was formed. The four societies then created the Iron and
Steel Trades Confederation, to which they formally ceded
powers and functions affecting the members of more than
one of the constituent bodies, and therefore all general
negotiations with the employers. The three old societies
continued formally in existence, but they bound themselves
not to enrol any new members, who were all to be taken
by the new society, to which all the existing members were
to be continuously urged to transfer themselves voluntarily.
This process has already gone so far that the new society
has swallowed up the British Steel Smelters' Society, which
has been wound up and completely merged in the new body,
into which the empty shells of the other two old bodies
will presently fall. The Iron and Steel Trades Confedera-
tion will then be composed of one society only, and may
be kept aUve only to serve the same transitional purpose
for other incoming societies.
The Compositors
The printing trades have remained, during the past thirty
years, curiously stationary so far as Trade Unionism is con-
cerned, the London Society of Compositors, the Typographical
Association, the Scottish Typographical Association, and the
Dublin Typographical Society having, in the aggregate, in-
creased their membership by three-fifths and steadily in-
creased their rates of pay and strategic strength against
their own employers, but commanding little influence in
the Trade Union Movement as a whole, and in many small
towns still leaving a considerable portion of the trade out-
^ The Amalgamated Society of Steel and Ironworkers and the Tin and
Sheet Millmen's Association failed to secure their members' ratification
by vote, whilst the National Association of Blastfurnacemen witliheld its
adhesion. These may be expected to adhere in due course.
The Shoemakers 493
side their ranks. The less-skilled workers in the paper-
making and printing establishments have greatly improved
their organisation ; and the National Union of Printing and
Paper Workers and the Operative Printers Assistants' Society
— both of them including women as well as men — have
become large and effective Trade Unions. All the societies
are united in the powerful Printing and Kindred Trades
Federation, to which the National Union of Joumahsts,
now a large society, has recently afifihated.
Boot and Shoemaking
Among the other constituents of the Trade Union world
in which a relative decline in influence is to be noted, is
that of the boot and shoemakers. Thirty years ago the
National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives had achieved
a position of great influence in the trade. It had joined
with the Employers' Associations in building up, as de-
scribed in our Industrial Democracy, an elaborate system
of Local Boards of Concihation and Arbitration, united
in a National Conference of dignity and influence, with
resort to Lord James of Hereford as umpire, by means of
which stoppages of work were prevented, and, more im-
portant still, the illegitimate use of boy labour was restrained
and standard piecework rates were arrived at by collective
bargaining, and authoritatively imposed on the whole trade.
In 1894 the whole machinery was broken up, at the instance
of the very employers who had agreed to it, and had co-
operated for years in its working, because they found that,
under the rules and at the piecework rates prescribed, the
men were " making too much."
After a prolonged stoppage in 1894 the dispute was
patched up by the intervention of the Labour Department
of the Board of Trade ; and the National Union of Boot
and Shoe Operatives, with 80,000 members, has, on the
whole, held its own with the emploj'ers, with less elaborate
formal relations ; but the work of the Union is impaired
494 Thirty Years' Growth
by the weakness of the organisation in the smaller workshops
and the less important local centres of the trade.
On the other side, we have the rise to influence, not only
in the Trade Union counsels but also in those of the nation,
of the Women Workers, the General Labourers, the " black-
coated proletariat " of shop assistants, clerks, teachers,
technicians, and officials, the minei;s and the railwayman,
which has been the outstanding feature of the past thirty
years.
Women Workers
In no section of the industrial commimity has the
advance of Trade Unionism during the last thirty years
been more marked than among the women workers. For
the first half of this period, indeed — though the aggregate
women membersliip of Trade Unions approximately doubled
— this meant only a rise from about 100,000 in 1890 to about
200,000 in 1907, mostly in the textile industries ; and the
number of women Trade Unionists outside those industries
was in the latter year still under 30,000. But the long-
continued patient work of the Women's Trade Union League
was having its effect ; and the idea of Trade Unionism
was being estabhshed among the women workers in many
different industries. Much is to be ascribed to the efforts
during these years of Sir Charles and Lady Dilke, who were
unwearied in their assistance. In 1909, largely at the
instance of Sir Charles Dilke and the women's leaders,
especially Miss Mary Macarthur, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell,
and Miss Susan Lawrence, Mr. Winston Churchill, as Presi-
dent of the Board of Trade, carried through Parliament
the Trade Boards Bill, which enabled a legal minimum
wage to be prescribed by joint boards in four specially
low-paid industries, in which mainly women were employed.
This measure not only considerably improved the position
of the sweated workers in the chain and nail trades, the
slop tailoring trade, paper box making and machine lace-
Women 495
making, but — as had been predicted on one side and
denied on the other — greatly stimulated independent
organisation among the women whose industrial status
was raised. The extension of the Trade Boards and of
the legal minimum wage in 19 13 to half a dozen other
trades had like effects, and the further extension of 1918
is already promising in the same direction. Trade Union
membership was further greatly increased during 1912-14
as a result of the National Insurance Act, which brought
many thousand recruits to the Approved Society sections
of the Unions. It was, however, the Great War, with its
unprecedented demand for women workers, and their
admission, in " dilution " of or in substitution for men, to
all sorts of occupations and processes into which they
had not previously penetrated, at earnings which they
had never before been permitted to receive, that brought
the women into Trade Unionism by the hundred thousand.
The National Federation of Women Workers — the largest
exclusively feminine Union — rose from 11,000 in 1914 to
over 60,000 in 1919. A small number of new Trade Unions
exclusively for women were estabhshed in particular sec-
tions, such as the interesting Httle society of Women Acety-
lene Welders. The bulk of the women, however, continued
to be organised in Trade Unions admitting both sexes.
Besides the various Textile Unions, there are now thousands
of women in the National Union of Railwaymen, the Railway
Clerks' Association, Boot and Shoe Operatives, and the
Iron and Steel Trades Confederation. Most of the general
labour Unions, and others like the National Union of
Printing and Paper Workers, the National Union of Shop
Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks, the Amalgamated
Union of Co-operative and Commercial Employees and
Alhed Workers, had for a couple of decades been enrolling
women members ; and the female membership of these
societies now grew by leaps and bounds. But the greater
part of the field of women's employment is still uncovered.
In 1920, though it may be estimated that the total women
496 Thirty Years' Growth
membership of Trade Unions is nearly three-quarters of a
milhon, this still represents less than 30 per cent of the
adult women wage-earners.
The outstanding feature in women's Trade Unionism
during the past decade has been its advance, not merely in
numbers and achievements, but also in status and influence.
This has come with accelerating speed. To the first Treasury
Conference in 1915, at which the Government sought the
help of the Trade Unions in the winning of the war, it
apparently did not occur to any official to invite the National
Federation of Women Workers ; but in all subsequent pro-
ceedings of the same nature Miss Mary Macarthur and Miss
Susan Lawrence, on behalf of the women Trade Unionists
in this and other societies, occupied a leading position.
Whether before the Munitions Act Tribunals, the Committee
on Production, or the Special Arbitration Tribunal set up by
the Government to deal with the conditions of employment
of women munition-workers, the women's case, whether
put by the representatives of the Women's Unions, or by
those of the principal Unions of general workers that included
women, was so ably conducted as to secure for the women
workers, almost for the first time, something like the same
measure of justice as that which the men had wrested from
the employers for themselves. The result was not only
a marked rise in the standard of remuneration for women,
the opening up to them of many fields of work from which
they had hitherto been excluded, and a general impi-ove-
ment in their conditions of employment, but also a rapid
development of Trade Unionism among them — nine-tenths
of the women Trade Unionists being in societies enrolling
both men and women — and the winning, for women's Trade
Unions, of the respect of the Trade Union world. For the
first time a woman was elected in 1919 by the Trades Union
Congress to its Parliamentary Committee, Miss Margaret
Bondfield, of the National Federation of Women Workers,
receiving over three million votes. On the reconstitution
in 1918 of the Labour Party, in which women had always
The General Workers 497
been accorded equal rights, provision was made so that
there should always be at least four women elected to the
Executive Committee. A Standing Joint Committee of
Women's Industrial Organisations, estabUshed in 1916, now
initiates and co-ordinates the action of the principal women's
Trade Unions, the Women's Co-operative Guild (which organ-
ises the women of the Co-operative movement), the Railway
Women's Guild, composed of the wives of railwaj'men, and
the Women's Labour League, now the women's section of
the Labour Party itself.
The General Workers
In 1888 the leaders of the skilled craftsmen and better-
paid workmen were inclined to believe that effective or
durable Trade Unionism among the general labourers and
unskilled or nondescript workmen was as impracticable as
it had hitherto proved to be among the mass of women
wage-earners. The outburst of Trade Unionism among the
dockers and gasworkers in 1888-89 was commonly expected
to be as transient as analogous movements had been in 1834
and 1 87 1. In 1920 we find the organisations of this despised
section, sorne of them of over thirty years' standing, account-
ing for no less than 30 per cent of the whole Trade Union
membership, and their leaders — notably Mr. Clynes, Mr.
Thome, and Mr. Robert WiUiams — exercising at least their
full share of influence in the counsels of the Trade Union
Movement as a whole. For a few years after 1889, indeed,
the aggregate membership of the newly-formed labourers'
Unions declined, and some of the weaker ones collapsed, or
became merged in the larger societies. But the Gasworkers'
and General Labourers' Union (estabUshed 1889), which
changed its name in 19 18 to the National Union of General
Workers ; and the Dock, Wharf, Riverside eind General
Workers' Union (estabUshed 1887) maintained themselves in
existence ; and already in 1907 there were as many as
150,000 organised labourers in half-a-dozen well-estabUshed
498 Thirty Years' Growth
societies. The outburst of Trade Unionism among the farm
labourers in 1890 gradually faded away. But in 1906 a
new society, the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural
Workers' Trade Union, was formed, which at once made
headway in Norfolk and the adjacent counties ; to be
followed in 1913 by the energetic Scottish Farm Servants'
Trade Union. Organisation was, between 1904 and 191 1,
steadily extending in all directions, when the passing of the
National Insurance Act, which practically compelled every
wage-earner to join an " Approved Society " of some kind,
led to a dramatic expansion of Ti;ade Union membersliip,
from which the various Unions of general workers, as they
now prefer to be styled, obtained their share of advantage.
The Workers' Union, in particular, which had been estab-
hshed in 1898, for the enrohnent of members among the
nondescript and semi-skilled workers of all sorts not catered
for by the craft Unions, had, after twelve years' existence,
only 5000 members in iii branches in 19 10, but grew
during 1911-13 to 91,000 members in 567 branches. In
three years more it stood at 197,000 members in 750 branches,
and by the end of 1919 its membership had risen to about
500,000 in nearly 2000 branches, comprising almost every
kind and grade of worker, of any age and either sex, from
clay-workers and tin miners to corporation employees and
sanitary inspectors, from domestic servants and waiters
to farm labourers and carmen, and every kind of nondescript
worker in the factory, the yard, or on the road. The
organising of the rural labourers has been shared by nearly
all the principal Unions of General Workers. The passing
of the Com Production Act in 1917, with its incidental
estabhshment of Joint Boards in every county of the United
Kingdom, empowered to fix a legal minimum wage for
a prescribed normal working day, had the result of greatly
extending Trade Union membership among aJl sections of
agricultural labourers, who are now (1920), for the iirst
time in history, more or less organised in every county of
Great Britain — partly in the very successful Agricultural
Transport ■ 499
Labourers' Union, which had, at the end of 191 9, 180,000
members in no fewer than 2700 branches ; partly in the
Workers' Union, which has a large number of agricultural
branches ; partly in the National Union of General Workers,
the Dock, Wharf and Riverside Labourers' Union, and the
National Amalgamated Union of Labour ; in all the Scottish
counties, in the powerful Scottish Farm Servants' Union ;
whilst in Ireland the agricultural wage-earners have been
enrolled in the Transport and General Workers' Union.
The total number of agricultural labourers in Trade Unions
in 1920 probably reaches more than three hundred thousand,
being about one-third of the total number of men employed
in agriculture at wages.
Throughout the years of war the membership of the
various Unions classified under the head of Transport and
General Labour (including the dockers and seamen), which
in 1892 was only 154,000, continued to increase by leaps
and bounds until, in 1920, their aggregate membership
considerably exceeds that of the entire Trade Union world
of 1890, and does not fall far short of a couple of millions.
Of recent years there has been a steady pressure towards
amalgamation and consolidation of forces. Many small and
local Unions have been merged, and several of the larger
bodies seem to be on the point of union. Meanwhile the
movement towards closer federation is strong. In 1908 all
the big general Labour Unions became associated in the
General Labourers' National Council, a useful consultative
body, having for its principal function the prevention of
overlapping and conflict among the different Unions. It
was successful in arranging for freedom of transfer and
mutual recognition of each other's membership among its
constituent Unions, and in promoting a certain amount of
demarcation of spheres, and even of amalgamation. This
Council in May 1917 developed into a National Federation
of General Workers, which includes eleven important general
Unions of General Workers, having an aggregate member-
ship of over 800,000. This important federation took a
500 Thirty Years' Growth
significant step towards unification in November 1919, in
appointing ten District Committees, consisting of two
representatives of each of the affiliated societies, charged to
consult with regard to any local trade dispute involving
more than one society.
Recent years have seen the rise of a new grouping. The
several Unions of seamen, Ughtermen, dock and wharf
labourers, coal-porters and carmen have asserted them-
selves as Transport Workers, seeking not merely to take
common action in matters of wages and hours, but also
to formulate regulations for the government of the whole
industry of transport (apart from that of railways), which
is one more example of the tendency to create " industrial "
federations on a national basis. The organisation for the
purpose is the National Transport Workers' Federation,
comprising three dozen of the Unions having among their
members men engaged in waterside transport work, in-
cluding seamen, dockers, and carters. It was formed in
November 1910 at the instance of the Dockers' Union, and
came at once into prominence during the London strike of
191 1, which it handled with great vigour.^ This was the
first great fight in the Port of London since the upheaval of
1889. The National Union of Sailors and Firemen, which
had in vain appealed to the Shipping Federation to unite
in constituting a Conciliation Board, in June 191 1 struck for
a uniform scale at all ports and various minor amehorations
of their conditions. Largely as a result of the excitement
caused by the seamen's strike, the dockers in July came
out for a rise from 6d. to 8d. per hour, with is. per hour
for overtime. The stevedores, the gasworkers, the carmen,
* The London dock labourers found themselves in 191 1, with an
increased cost of living and the virtual abandonment of attempts to
improve their method of employment, Uttle better oflf than in 1889. See
Casual Labour at the Docks, by H. A. Mess, 1916 ; and, for the position
at other ports, Le Travail castiel davs les ports anglais, by J. Malcgue,
1913 ; The Liverpool Docks Problem, 1912, and The First Year's Wcking
of the Liverpool Dock Scheme, 1914, both by R. WilUams (of the Labour
Exchange) ; and " Towards the Solution of the Casual Labour Problem,"
by F. Keeling, in Economic Journal, March 1913.
The Dock Strike 501
the coal-porters, the tug-enginemen, the grain porters, and
various other bodies of men engaged in or about the port,
put forward their own claims. Amid great excitement the
whole port was stopped, great meetings on Tower Hill were
held daily, and processions of strikers, said to have been
as many as 100,000 in number, paraded through the City.
The unrest spread to most other ports, and there were some
local disturbances. The Port of London Authority, under
Lord Devonport, refused all parley, and the Government
for some time practically supported this great corporate
employer, which had failed (and has to this day failed) to
comply with the section of the Act of Parliament by which
it was constituted directing it to institute a scheme for
more civiUsed conditions of employment for its labourers.
The War Office, at the request of Mr. Winston Churchill,
who was then at the Home Office, accumulated troops in
London, and actually threatened to put 25,000 soldiers to
break the strike by doing the dockers' work — a step which
would undoubtedly have led to bloody conflict in the streets.
Finally, however, the Cabinet gave way, and persuaded
Lord Devonport and his colleagues, together with shipowners,
wharfingers, and granary proprietors, to meet the representa-
tives of the Unions with a view to agreement. For three
whole days they sat and argued, ultimately arriving at an
agreement under which the men returned to work on the
immediate concession of about half their demand and the
remission of the other half to arbitration. This was under-
taken by Sir Albert Rollit, M.P., at the instance of the
London Chamber of Commerce, his award eventually con-
ceding to the men substantially their whole claim ; summed
up in 8d. per hour for the dockers, with is. per hour for
overtime, other trades, and the men at other ports, obtain- '
ing, in one or other form, analogous advantages.^ In May
1912 the dispute flared up again in the Thames and Medway,
* History of the London Transport Workers' Strike, by Ben Tillett,
191 1 ; The Great Strike Movement of igii and its Lessons, by H. W. Lee,
191 1 ; The Times ipx June-August 191 1 ; Labour Gazette, 1911-12.
502 Thirty Years' Growth
when a combined strike and lock-out, in which 80,000 men
were involved, stopped the work of the port for six weeks.
Sympathetic strikes in other ports led to some 20,000 men
being idle for a few days. The men asserted that the
employers had not in all cases fulfilled the agreement of
the previous year, and were discriminating against Trade
Unionists. The employers seem to have been concerned,
in the main, to avoid recognition of the Transport Workers'
Federation, and to check its growing authority. In spite
of the vigorous support of the Daily Herald ; of pecuniary
help, not only from Australia and the United States, but
also from the German Trade Unions ; and of the mediation
of the Government, the strike failed owing to the men
breaking away, and to the stubborn obstinacy of Lord
Devonport, as Chairman of the Port of London Authorit}^
who insisted on a resumption of work upon the employers'
assurance that they would respect all agreements and
consider any grievances put forward by the representatives
of any section. Notwithstanding the failure of this some-
what premature effort of thq Transport Workers' Federation,
its formation, together with that of the National Federation
of General Workers, have gone far to transform the position.
For a couple of decades the efforts of the General Labourers'
Unions took the form of innumerable local and sectional
demands, not merely for higher rates of pay, though ad-
vances of several shillings per week have continually been
secured, but for mutual agreement of piecework rates, a
reduction of working hours, insistence on compensation for
accidents, the provision of better accommodation or greater
amenity in work, and extra allowances for tasks of peculiar
strain or discomfort. The efforts of the federations have
raised these local and sectional arrangements to the level
of national questions ; and the agreements now concluded
with the employers' national representatives amoimt to an
increasingly effective control over the industry.
The Shop Assistants 503
The " Black-Coated Proletariat "
If Trade Unionism has, in the past thirty years, success-
fully progressed downward to the women and the unskilled
labourers, its advance, in a sense upwards, among the
various sections of the " black-coated proletariat," has been
no less remarkable. In 1892 there were only the smallest
signs of Trade Union organisation among the clerks and
shop assistants, the various sections of Post Office and
other Government employees, the municipal officers, and
the Ufe assurance agents. Among wage-earners in these
various occupations, numbering in the United Kingdom
possibly several millions — badly paid, working under
unsatisfactory conditions, and sometimes subject to actual
tyranny — there were;, thirty years ago, a few dozen small
and strugghng Trade Unions, with only a few tens of
thousands of aggregate membership. In 1920 these
have developed into powerful amalgamations in most of
%he several sections, nearly all fully recognised by their
employers, whether private or pubhc, with whom they
enter into collective agreements ; and enrolling a total
membership falling not far short of three-quarters of a
miUion.
We may note first the army of shop assistants, ware-
housemen, and other employees in the distributive trades,
wholesale and retail.^ The National Amalgamated Union of
Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks, estabhshed
in 1891, made at first slow progress, and counted in 1912,
after a couple of decades of growth, fewer than 65,000
members. Partly as a result of the National Insurance
Act, which practically compelled aU employees under ;^i6o
to join some organisation, the Union went ahead by leaps
and bounds, multiplying its branches and swelling its num-
bers, until it counts now over 100,000 members. Meanwhile
* The Working Life of Shop Assistants, by Joseph Hallsworth and
R. J. Davis, 1913.
504 Thirty Years* Growth
the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees (also
established in 1891) — in 1918 adding to its title also " Com-
mercial Employees and AlHed Workers " — has benefited
by a similar expansion, counting, in 1920, also about 100,000
members. This society started on the basis of enrolUng all
employees of the Co-operative Societies, whatever their
crafts, and no other persons, a constitution now disapproved
of by the Trades Union Congress. It is, however, not now
confined to persons employed by co-operative societies ;
and whilst it includes a number of carmen, tailors, bakers,
bootmakers, and others in co-operative emplojonent who
should more appropriately belong to other Unions, the
negotiations that have been for some time in progress for
the merging of both organisations in a single great Union of
persons employed in the distributive trades, and the transfer
of those belonging to specific crafts to their o^^^l societies,
may probably presently be successful.
Of clerks, the most effective organisation is that of the
clerical service of the railway companies, the RailMay
Clerks' Association, which takes in also stationmasters,
inspectors, and ticket-collectors (who are all eligible also for
the National Union of Railwaymen, which some of them
have joined). Established in 1897, it continued for a decade
insignificant in magnitude, and had not by 1910 enrolled
as many as 10,000 members. After the railway strike of
1911 it began to forge ahead, passing from 30,000 in 1914
to 42,000 in 1915 — a total doubled by 1920, and with increas-
ing strength it obtained gradually increasing recognition from
the railway companies, successfully maintaining its right
to enrol, not only clerks in the General Managers' offices, but
also inspectors and stationmasters. As its membership
grew, it was able successfully to contest the elections for
representatives on the committees of the various super-
annuation funds instituted by the companies, and thereby
to demonstrate its right to speak for the whole body of
railway clerks. Whilst acting in friendly association with
tlie National Union of Railwa3mien, the Railway Clerks'
The Clerks 505
Association has latterly drawn to itself an ever-increasing
proportion of the inspectors and stationmasters ; and in 1920,
when it can count on a membership of nearly 90,000, it is
claiming to speak for all grades of the Railway Clerical Admin-
istrative and Supervisory Staff. Since 1913, at least, it has
been asserting a claim, as soon as the railways are national-
ised, to some participation in their management ; and at
the end of 1919, it is understood, some promise was made by
the Minister of Transport that, in any Railway Board or
National Advisory Committee that may be constituted, the
Railway Clerks' Association would, with the National Union
of Railwaymen and the Associated Society of Locomotive
Engineers and Firemen, be accorded its due share of
representation.
The great army of clerks in commercial offices has
made less progress in organisation than the shop assistants
and the railway clerks. For years, indeed, it seemed as if
commercial clerks would not form a Trade Union ; and the
National Union of- Clerks (established 1890) made Uttle
headway. In 1912 it had still under 9000 members. In
the past seven years it has bounded up to 55,000 members.^
There is also a small Irish Clerical Workers' Union, princi-
pally in Dublin, resulting from a secession from the National
Union. Most remarkable of all has been the formation,
during the war, of a Bank Officers' Guild and an Irish Bank
Officials' Association, having definitely Trade Union objects
(though not yet seeking to join the Trades Union Congress),
both of them being independent of the Bankers' Institute,
which retains the character of a scientific and educational
society. There is now even a Guild of Law Court Officials,
having definitely Trade Union objects.
' The great body of teachers of all kinds and grades,
^ numbering altogether about 300,000 men and women in
the United Kingdom, have, during the past thirty years,
become strongly and very elaborately organised in many
^ A separate Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, long small
in membership, has also risen to 4500 members.
i
5o6 Thirty Years' Growth
different societies.^ Wliat is significant is the extent to
which many of these professional associations have latterly
adopted the purposes, and even the characteristic methods,
of Trade Unionism. The largest of these bodies, the
National Union of Teachers, established in 1890, has now
over 102,000 members, and exercises great influence upon
the conditions of employment of the teachers in elementary
schools. During the past few years it has supported
various district or county strikes for better salary-scales.
The teachers in secondary schools are organised in four
societies, for headmasters, headmistresses, assistant masters,
and assistant mistresses respectively, united in a Federal
Council of Secondary School Associations, which, though
it has not yet fomented or supported a strike, has of late
organised effective pressure to obtain greater security of
tenure for assistants, better salary-scales, and a universal
superannuation scheme.
Equally significant is the recent development of organisa-
tion among the industrial technicians, whether engineers,
electricians, chemists, or merely foremen and managers ;
among the workers in scientific laboratories, whether for
research, medical, teaching, or administrative purposes ;
and among the junior lecturers and assistants at University
institutions. These organisations overlap in their spheres,
if not also in their memberships, and are not yet stabilised,
but most of them are united in the National Federation of
Professional Workers of even wider scope. What is im-
portant is the growing divergence between what are essen-
tially Trade Unions of the brain-working professionals and
the purely " scientific societies " to which such persons have,
until recent years, restricted their tendency to professional
association. Some of the new bodies (such as the Society of
Technical Engineers) have actually registered themselves
as Trade Unions, a step taken also by the Medico-Political
^ See English Teachers and their Professional Onianisations, by Mrs.
Sidney Webb, published as supplements to The New Statesman of Sep-
tember 25 and October 2, 1915.
The Civil Service 507
Union, a vigorous association of medical practitioners ;
whilst the newly formed Actors' Association, hke the National
Union of Journalists, has applied for affiHation to the
Trades Union Congress.
The life assurance agents — principally those employed
in " industrial " insurance — ^number 100,000, and they have
become organised in a score of societies, restricted to the
staffs of particular companies. These organisations vary in
their nature and in their degree of independence, from mere
" welfare societies," dominated by the management, up to
aggressive Trade Unions — the strongest being the National
Association of Prudential Assurance Agents. They are
mostly united in two different federations. Another, and
perhaps wholesomer, basis of organisation is adopted by
the National Union of Life Assurance Agents, which has
now some thousands of members.
But the greatest development of Trade Unionism among
the " black-coated proletariat " has been among the em-
ployees of the National and Local Government. This has
been entirely a growth of the past thirty years. Beginning
among the manual working staff of the Postmaster-General,
and among the artisans and labourers of the Government
dockyards, arsenals, and other manufacturing departments,
there are now a hundred and seventy separate Trade Unions
of State employees, from the crews of the Customs launches
and the boy clerks, up to the Admiralty Constructive
Engineers and the Superintendents of- Mercantile Marine
Offices. Of recent years, organisation has spread to the
higher grades of the Civil Service, even to the " Class I."
clerks ; and practically no one below the rank of an Under-
Secretary of State is held to be outside the scope of the
Society of Civil Servants. All the various societies are
grouped in federations, from the " Waterguard Federation "
and the Prison Officers' Federation of the United Kingdom ;
through the United Government Workers' Federation and
the Federal Council of Government Employees, combining
the various kinds of manual working operatives ; up to the
5o8 Thirty Years' Growth
Customs and Excise Federation, the Civil Service Federa-
tion, the Civil Service. Alhance, and even the " National
Federation of Professional Workers," which includes also
teachers. The strongest of all these bodies is probably
that of the various employees of the Postmaster-General,
whose fight to secure " recognition " and the opportunity
for " Collective Bargaining " has extended over a couple
of decades. There are about fifty separate Unions of Post
Office employees, mostly small and sectional bodies ; but
the three principal societies (the Postal and Telegraph
Clerks' Association, the Postmen's Federation; and the
Fawcett Association) were amalgamated in 1919 into one
powerful Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members
with eleven salaried officers, and affiliated both to the
Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which can
now meet the managing officials of the Post Office on some-
thing hke equal terms.
The employees of the Local Authorities — thirty years
ago entirely without organisation — are still not so well
combined as those of the National Government. A score
of different societies, from such grades as school-keepers,
police and prison officers and asylum attendants, up to
municipal clerks, share the work with the National Union
of Corporation Workers and the Municipal Employees' Asso-
ciation. A large proportion of the wage-earners employed
by Local Authorities are to be found in the Unions of
General Workers. The National Association of Local
Government Officers and Clerks is a large and powerful
■body, composed mainly of the clerical and supervisory
grades.
Trade Unionism in the public service received a great
fillip after 1906, when Mr, Herbert Samuel at the Post
Office, together with some other Ministers, " recognised "
the Unions of their employees, considered their corporate
representations, and agreed to meet their officials. It was
still further promoted when, in 1912, the Government con-
sented to the establishment of an independent Arbitration
The Police Union 509
Tribunal for determining the terms of employment in the
Ci\Tl Service for all grades and sections under £500 a year.
Before this tribunal, whose awards were definitively authori-
tative, the representatives of any association could appear
as plaintiffs, those of the Treasury appearing always as
defendants. Finally, after the promulgation in 1917 of the
" WTiitley Report," which the Government, in impressing
on other employers, found itself constrained to adopt in its
own establishments, there was established during 1919 an
elaborate series of joint councils (including even the civil
departments of the War Office and the Admiralty) for
particular branches of estabhshments ; for whole depart-
ments, and for whole grades of the service throughout all
departments, in which equal numbers of persons nominated
by the employees' associations, and of superior officers
chosen by the Government, representing the management,
meet periodically to discuss on equal terms questions of
office organisation, professional training, conditions of
service, methods of promotion, and what not.^
^ From 191 3 onward a persistent attempt to establish a Trade Union
was made by many of the PoUce and Prison Officers, which was resisted
by the Home Secretary, as responsible for the MetropoUtan PoUce, and by
all the Local Authorities. In 191 3 the Police and Prison Ofiicers' Union
was formed by ex-Inspector Symes, and in 1917 it was reorganised, without
securing either recognition or sanction. Cases of " victimisation " having
occurred, there was a sudden strike on August 29, 1918, which was partici-
pated in by nearly the whole of the pohce in many London divisions. This
took the world (and also the criminal population) by surprise ; but through
good-humoured handUng by the Prime Minister (who received the Execu-
tive Committee of the Union and told them that " the Union could not be
recognised during the war "), the Government persuaded the men promptly
to resume their duties, with a cessation of " victimisation " for joining
the Union and a substantial increase of pay. When hostilities ceased, the
Union expected some measure of official sanction, but none was accorded,
and grievances remained unredressed. On July 31, 1919, a second strike
was suddenly called, which resulted in failure, only a couple of thousand
men coming out in London, and a few hundred in Liverpool, Birkenhead,
and elsewhere, together with a smaU number of prison warders. At
Liverpool and Birkenhead there wa5 serious looting of shops and pubHc-
houses by turbulent crowds. The authorities stood firm, the Home
Secretary refusing all sanction for the estabhshment of a Trade L'nion in
the police force and prison staff, and summarily dismissing all the strikers,
at the same time announcing large concessions in the way' of wages, pro-
motion, and pensions, and conceding, not a Trade Union, but the estabUsh-
510 Thirty Years' Growth
The Mine^rs
The outstanding feature of the Trade Union world be-
tween 1890 and 1920 has been the growing predominance,
in its counsels and in its collective activity, of the organised
forces of the coal-miners. Right down to 1888, as we have
seen, the coal - miners of England, Scotland, and Wales,
though sporadically forming local associations and now and
again engaging in j&erce conflicts with their employers, first
in this coalfield and then in that, had failed to maintain
any organisation of national scope. Though their repre-
sentatives participated from time to time in the general
activities of the Trade Union Movement, and sat in the
Trades Union Congress ; though with the guidance of W. P.
Roberts in the 'forties, and under the successive leadership
of Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt in the 'sixties
and 'seventies, they exercised intermittently a considerable
influence on its Parhamentary action — the miners, for the
most part, kept to themselves, framed their own poUcy, and
fought their own battles, in which, owing to an apparently
incurable " locahsm," their success was not commensurate
with their strength. The change came with the growing
dissatisfaction with the policy of the Sliding Scale. This
device for making the rate of wages vary in proportion to
the selling price of coal, the adoption of which between
1874 and 1880 — against the wish of Alexander Macdonald,
and contrary to the advice of such friends as Professor
Beesly and Lloyd Jones — we have already described, pro-
duced in the 'eighties an ever-increasing discontent. In
1881 the miners of Yorkshire merged their two Unions of
South and West Yorkshire into the Yorkshire Miners'
ment of an elective organisation of the police force, by grades, entitled
to make formal representations and complaints. This concession was
embodied in the Police Act, 19 19, which explicitl}' prohibited to the poUce
either membership of, or affiliation to, any Trade Union or poUtical organ-
isation. The dismissed policemen were not reinstated, but the Govern-
ment informally assisted some of them to obtain other employment.
The Rise of the Miners 511
Association, which began its successful career by terminating
the local Sliding Scale agreement, and resolutely refused all
future attempts to make wages depend on selling prices.
The Lancashire and Cheshire Miners' Federation, a less well-
organised body, presently followed its example. In 1885
a Midland Federation was formed by a number of smaller
local associations for the purpose both of abohshing the
Shding Scale and of promoting the movement for an Eight
Hours Day by legislative enactment. Three years later, at
a conference at Manchester, the associations of Yorkshire,
Lancashire and Cheshire, the Midlands, and Fifeshire, with
a nascent local organisation in South Wales, estabUshed the
Miners' Federation of Great Britain. ^ The aggregate mem-
bership of all these bodies was amazingly small — at the
start only 36,000 — but the new Federation had, from the
first, a definite policy and great driving force. Outside it
there remained the solid and numerically strong Durham
Miners' Association and the Northumberland Miners' Mutual
Confident Association, which (together with a surviving
remnant of the Amalgamated Association in South Stafford-
shire, and the purely nominal Sliding Scale Associations
which then characterised most of the South Wales coalfield)
still clung together as the National Union. It was the
^ For the history of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain and the
contemporary District Unions, we have drawn on the voluminous printed
minutes of proceedings and reports which are seldom seen outside the
Miners' Offices ; the various pubUcations of the Labour Department of
the Board of Trade (now the Ministry of Labour) and the Home Of&ce ;
The British Coal Trade, by H. Stanley Jevons (1915) ; The British Coal
Industry, by Gilbert Stone (1919) ; Labour Strife in the South Wales
Coalfield, 1910-Ji, by D. Evans (191 1) ; The Adjustment of Wages, by
Sir W. J. Ashley ; Miners' Wages and the Sliding Scale, by W. Smart
(1894) ; Miners and the Eight Hours Movement, by M. Percy ; History of
the Durham Miners' Association, by J. Wilson (1907) ; A Great Labour
Leader [Thomas Burt], by Aaron Watson (1908); Memoirs of a Miners'
Leader, by J. Wilson (i 910) ; Industrial Unionism and the Mining Industry,
by George Harvey {1917) ; A Plan for the Democratic Control of the Mining
Industry, by the Industrial Committee of the South Wales SociaUst Society
(19 19) ; the Reports and evidence of the Coal Industry Commission, 1919,
and the voluminous newspaper discussion to which it gave rise, together
with Facts from the Coal Commission and Further Facts from the Coal
Commission, both by R. Page Amot (19 19).
512 Thirty Years' Growth
National Union which played the leading part in securing
reforms in the Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1887, which
firmly established the checkweigher in practically every
colliery of any importance. But this was its last con-
structive effort. Its subsequent history is Uttle more than
the long-drawn-out resistance of the able and respected
leaders of the Northumberland and Durham miners to the
new ideas of Labour policy which were, as we have de-
scribed, becoming dominant in the Trades Union Congress,
and which were from the first adopted, if not by all the
leaders, at least by the successive delegate conferences of
the Miners' Federation.
The establishment of the Federation coincided with a
period of rapid expansion in the coal-mining industry. The
number of persons employed rose considerably year after
year, and Trade Unionism spread rapidly among them. An
effective local organisation was built up in district after
district, everywhere based on the autonomy in local con-
cerns of the " lodge " or branch, consisting of the workers
at a given colliery, and governed by mass meetings of the
members, who elect a committee, which usually meets at
least weekly. But although the National Union declined
steadily in influence, it took twenty years to bring all the
district associations into the Miners' Federation, the aggre-
gate membership of which did not reach 200,000 until 1893,
and seven years later was still only 363,000. Even so, the
miners were, as we described them in 1892, in some ways
the most effectively organised of the industrial groups into
which we divided the Trade Union world of that date.
With the adhesion of Northumberland and Durham in 1908,
when the National Union came finally to an end, the mem-
bership of the Federation rose to ncarl}'^ 600,000, whilst tlie
next twelve years' growth of the industry, and the inclusion
of a large proportion of the sectional unions among different
grades of mine-workers,^ have brought it in 1920 to ncarl}'^
900,000.
* The cngincmen, boilermen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen,
The Miners' Strike 513
Meanwhile issue was joined by the mine-owners, who
insisted everywhere in 1893 on considerable reductions in
the wage-rates, on the plea that selling prices had fallen.
The great strike that followed involved 400,000 men, and
lasted from July to November. In the end the men had
to submit to reductions, though they gained the important
point of the practical though not explicit recognition of a
minimum below which there was to be no fall. The next
great achievement of the Federation was the carrying into
law of the Eight Hours Bill, which, mainly owing to the
opposition of the leaders of the Northumberland and Dur-
ham Miners, was not accomplished until 1908 ; and their
influence in improving the Mines Regulation Act of 191 1.
Their third success, the outcome of a decade of successful
organisation and intellectual leadership by Mr. Robert
SmiUie, who since 1912 has been annually elected to the
presidency, was attained only at the cost of the greatest
industrial struggle that Great Britain had yet experienced.
The national strike of miners in 19 12, when practically
every mine was stopped, and nearly a million miners sus-
pended work for more than a month, arose out of the failure
of the colliery companies to make adequate provision for
repeated cases of individual hardship and injustice. The
piece-work rates of the hewers or getters of coal might be
satisfactorily adjusted to the agreed day- wage standard of
the district, though the arrangements for this adjustment
vary from district to district, and even from mine to mine,
and are very far from complete or satisfactory. But what
was to happen when, from circumstances beyond his own
control, the miner found himself unable to get enough coal
to produce a subsistence wage ? If he is assigned an
" abnormal place " — where the seam is thin or crushed
under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials, colliery clerks and
various kinds of surface-workers about the mines have all their own
Unions, which have greatly developed of recent years, and are in many
districts not very wilhng to join the county miners' associations, though
they often act in conjunction with these. Their own federations are
referred to on p. 550.
514 Thirty Years' Growth
into small coal (for which, in South Wales, the hewer is
not paid at all) ; or where exceptional timbering is required
to prevent dangerous falls ; or where there is much " stone "
or water : or if, in " normal places," the colhery manage-
ment does not keep him regularly supplied with " trams "
or " tubs " into which to load the coal ; or with a sufficient
provision of timber for props and sleepers ; or of rails —
no amount of skill, strength, or assiduity will prevent
his earnings from falHng away, it may be to next to nothing.
What had long been customary was, in some coalfields,
the casting of lots for " places," and thus a periodical
exchange of opportunities ; and in others the granting
of an allowance, or " consideration," to hewers who com-
plained of insufficient earnings. These allowances were
granted irregularly, without the protection of Collective
Bargaining, \vith insufficient provision for ensuring the
avoidance of injustice ; and it is not now denied that, in
some coUieries, particularly in South Wales, the owners
resorted to the simple expedient of restricting the manager
to a fixed maximum sum each " measuring-up day," irre-
spective of the number and extent of the men's reasonable
claims. These sums, moreover, were much reduced in
times of bad trade, when profits were at a minimum,
especially in coUieries which were actually working at a loss.
The agitation for securing a prescribed minimum of daily
earnings for all the piece-workers continued for a whole
decade without much result, producing not a few local
stoppages, especially in South Wales. These flared up, in
the latter part of 1910, in the Aberdare and Rhondda
valleys, into an almost continuous series of disputes. The
Miners' Federation found itself compelled in July 1911 to
take the matter up as a national question ; and a ballot of
its whole membership decided for a national strike if the
universal adoption of the principle of a prescribed daily
minimum, not merely for hewers but for all grades, was not
conceded. The owners quibbled and eventually refused ;
and after a further ballot a national strike was decided on,
The Minimiim Wage 515
which the Government negotiations failed to avert, and
wliich,. after long and repeated notice, began at the end of
February 1912, and rapidly extended to practically every
coUiery in the kingdom. As neither the employers nor the
workmen would give way, the Government then announced
its intention of introducing a Bill to pro\dde for the payment,
to all underground workers in the mine, not of the prescribed
minimum rates which the several districts had formulated,
nor yet of the overriding national minima of 5s. for a man
and 2s. for a boy which were being demanded, but of district
minima, to be prescribed in each coalfield by a Joint Board
of employers and workmen, presided over by an impartial
chairman. These provisions were bitterly opposed, not only
by the coal-owners, who objected to any legal minimum,
but also by the workmen's representatives in the House of
Commons, who demanded a prescribed national minimum ;
but they were carried into law by substantial majorities.
The Federation Executive was perplexed as to the Une to
take, as half the membership wanted to carry on the struggle ;
but it was eventually decided to give the Act and the Joint
Boards a chance, and the strike was declared at an end.
The district minima and the rules applicable thereto had,
in most cases, to be decided by the impartial chairmen ;
and they varied considerably from district to district, being
usually a little less than the workmen had claimed. But
when the ■\yorking of the system was understood, and it
was got smoothly into operation, it was recognised that the
Miners' Federation had achieved a very substantial victory.
The miners had brought to their aid, in enforcing the pay-
ment of a periodically prescribed Minimum Day Wage to
aU underground workers, the strong arm of the law — not,
it is true, as under the Mines Regulation Acts and the
Factory and Workshop Acts, the criminal law, enforced by
Government inspectors and prosecutions, but the civil law
of contract, which they could themselves enforce by actions
in the County Court. What the Federation extorted from
the Government and the Legislature was " an extraordinary
5i6 Thirty Years' Growth
piece of hastily prepared legislation rushed through Parlia-
ment in the shadow of an unprecedented national calamity."^
It has been found by experience that this Act, which is
nominally only temporary, does secure to the hewers a
substantial minimiuii of day wages, however unremunera-
tive their conditions of work ; and the fixing of rates by
the Joint Boards has, on the whole, considerably increased
the wages of the various grades of the less skilled workers.
But more important than these immediate results was
the demonstration and the consolidation of the national
strength of the Miners' Federation itself ; and the respect
which its great power henceforth secured for it, alike in
the Trade Union Movement, with the emplo3'^ers, and at the
hands of the Government and the House of Commons.
The miners' organisations were fully occupied for a year
or two in putting into operation the Act of 1912, and in
enforcing the determinations of the Joint Boards. But in
1913 the delegate conference made a new move in authoris-
ing the Executive Committee to enter into relations with
other Trade Unions with a view to joint action for mutual
assistance. A formal alliance had been made between the
Miners' Federation, the National Union of Railwaymen, and
the Transport Workers' Federation — commonly referred to
as the Triple AlHance — when everything was suddenly
changed by the breaking out of the Great War. The 1500
colUery companies and individual coHiery owTiers, most
of whom are united in the Mining Association of Great
Britain, as well as in district associations, have, throughout,
steadfastly refused to meet the Miners' Federation for the
negotiation of any national agreement, or the concession
of national advances ; although there has long been elaborate
machinery for negotiation in each district.
During the four and a quarter years that the world
conflict lasted (i 914-18), the miners, hke the rest of
the British working class, patriotically subordinated their
interests to those of the nation as a whole. They volun-
* The British Coal Trade (by H. Stanley Jcvons, 191 5), p. 599.
The Six Hours Day 517
teered for military service in such numbers that they had
to be forbidden to leave the mines, and numbers of them
were sent back from the armies in order to maintain the
output of coal. Where, as in Durham, they had agreements
securing them advances of wages in proportion to the rise
in the selling price, they forewent these advances ; and they
contented themselves everywhere with less substantial
percentages of rise in rates, and with the two successive
war bonuses of eighteen pence a day each — much below the
rise in the cost of Uving — which the Government accorded
to them in 19 17 and 19 18, With the cessation of hostilities
at the end of 1918, as the cost of living continued to advance,
the Miners' Federation (which had elected for its new
secretary a young South Wales miner, Mr. Frank Hodges,
who had educated himself at Labour Colleges ; and had
also converted its presidency into a full-time salaried post,
and for the first time acquired an office in London) again
took up the forward movement which it had been concerting
five years before ; and in February 1919, after balloting its
whole membership, and giving elaborate notice, it demanded
from the employers a general advance of wages of 30 per
cent, the reduction of the hours of labour by an average
of one-fourth (the nominal Eight Hours Day to be made
a nominal Six Hours Day), and — most momentous of aU —
the elimination of the profit-making capitahst from the
industry by the Nationalisation of the Mines, for which
the Trades Union Congress had been vainly asking for
over twenty years. As the railwaymen and the transport
workers were at the same time in negotiation for improve-
ments in their condition, there seemed, in March 1919,
every prospect of the outbreak of a general strike on a
scale even greater than that of 1912, the " Triple AUiance "
uniting a membership of more than a million and a half,
and wielding in combination the adult male labour of
something like one-sixth of the whole nation. The Govern-
ment, which was still, under war powers, directing both
the mines and the railways, responded by the offer of
5i8 Thirty Years' Growth
a Statutory Commission, under a Judge of the High Court,
with practically unlimited powers of investigation and
recommendation ; at the same time giving the Federation
publicly to understand that, whilst a strike would be sup-
pressed with all the powers of the State, the recommenda-
tions of the Commission would be accepted by the Cabinet.
The conference of the Miners' Federation spent many hours
in deliberation. A large section of the delegates was for an
immediate strike. The men had, indeed, an extraordinarily
advantageous strategic position. The nation's stocks of
coal were at a minimum, London having only three days'
supply in hand. Ultimately the advice of the leaders
prevailed ; and it was decided to postpone the withdrawal
of labour for three weeks, and to take part in the Statutory
Commission, on the express condition that this body pre-
sented an Interim Report within that time ; and — most
revolutionary of all — that the Federation should be allowed
to nominate to the Commission, not only three of its own
members to balance the three coal-owners who had been
informally designated by the Mining Association - of Great
Britain, but also three out of the six professedly disinterested
members, so as to balance the three capitalists whom the
Government had already chosen as representing the prin-
cipal industries dependent on the supply of coal at a moderate
price. To these terms the Prime Minister acceded. The
Miners' Federation, setting a new precedent of far-reaching
effect, thereupon nominated, along with its President, Mce-
president, and Secretary, not three other workmen, but
three economists and statisticians belonging to the Fabian
Society, known to them by their lectures and writings.
The proceedings of this Commission, which sat daily in
public in the King's Robing-Room at the House of Lords,
created an immense sensation. Instead of the Trade Union,
it was the management of the industry that was put upon
its trial. The large profits of the industry under war
conditions were revealed, and especially the enonnous gains
of the most advantageous mines ; and although the Govern-
The Royal Commission - 5^9
ment itself had benefited through the Excess Profits'
Duty by 50, 60, and eventually 80 per cent of these gains,
it became apparent to every^ one that, but for this abstrac-
tion, the price of coal might have been reduced and the
miners' conditions improved to an extent never before
suspected. It was seen, too, that it was the separate
ownership of the mines which stood in the way of the
national sharing of the advantages of the best among them.
The chaotic state of the industry, with 1500 separately
working joint-stock companies operating at very different
costs — with no co-ordination of production, and with
extremely wasteful arrangements for transport and retail
distribution — was vividly presented. At the same time
the unsatisfactory conditions under wliich the miners lived
were impressively demonstrated, the scandalously bad
housing of the mining community in Lanarkshire and else-
where making a national sensation. Prompt to the
appointed day the Commission presented three Reports.
The three mine-owners proposed no improvement in the
organisation of the industry, and offered an advance of
eighteen pence a day and a reduction of hours by one per
day, being only half what was demanded. The six repre-
sentatives of the miners presented a long and reasoned
justification of the men's case ; arguing that, with a uni-
fication of the industry in national ownership, with the
adoption in all the mines of the mechanical improvements
already in use in the best-managed among them, with a
more carefully concerted transport system, and with a
municipal organisation of retail distribution, it was practic-
able to concede the men's full claim of 30 per cent advance
and a two hours' shortening of the working day without any
increase in the price of coal to the consumer. The Chair-
man of the Commission presented a third report, inter-
mediate in its tenour, in which he was joined by the three
disinterested capitahst members, proposing an immediate
advance of two shillings per day, or 20 per cent, and an
immediate reduction of one hour per day, with a promise
520 Thirty Years' Growth
of a further reduction by an hour in 1920, if the condition
of the industry warranted it. With regard to nationahsa-
tion,this Report declared that, as there had not been sufficient
time to investigate the proposal, the Commission would
continue its sittings, and promptly present a further report ;
but that it was plain, even on the evidence so far submitted,
that the present system stood condemned, and that some
other system must, by national purchase of the mines, be
substituted for it — either State administration, or some plan
by which the mines could be placed under a joint control in
which the miners would share. This impressive declaration
by the judicial Chairman, supported by the three capitaUst
members who were not mine-owners, made a great public
sensation. The Cabinet immediately accepted the Chair-
man's Report, pledging itself to carry it out " in the letter
and in the spirit." The Miners' Federation hesitated, but
ultimately, in consideration of the offer of an immediate
further examination of nationalisation, in the light of
Mr. Justice Sankey's significant findings, decided to ballot
its members, who, to the great relief of the pubUc, by large
majorities agreed to accept the Government proposal.
The Coal Industry Commission accordingly continued
its sittings, now concentrating upon the issue of Nationalisa-
tion and the participation of the miners in control. The
dramatic feature of the inquiry was the summoning of
a succession of peers and other magnates ou-ning mining
royalties to the witness-chair, there to explain to the Com-
mission and the public, under the sharp cross-examination
of the Miners' Federation officials, how • they or their
ancestors had become possessed of these property riglits,
how much they yielded in each case, and what social
service the recipients performed for their huge incomes.
Much evidence was taken for and against State administra-
tion. Within a couple of months of almost incessant daily
sittings this indefatigable Commission presented its further
Report, again hopelessly divided. On the question of
ownership of minerals, indeed, the whole thirteen Com-
A Share in Control 521
missioners were unanimous — a momentous decision — in
recommending that the royalty owners should be at once
expropriated in favour of the State. All thirteen Com-
missioners were unanimous, too, in recommending the
admission of the workmen to some degree of participation
in the management by Pit and District Committees. But
there the Commissioners' agreement ended. ^Vhat was
significant was that not the miners' representatives only,
but eight out of the thirteen (including the Chairman)
reported in favour of expropriating all the existing colliery
companies and other coal-owners. The Chairman, sup-
ported (in general terms and subject to additional sugges-
tion) by the six miners' representatives, proposed an
elaborate scheme of Nationahsation, with administration
under a Minister of Mines by joint District Councils and
Pit Committees, in which the men would be largely repre-
sented. The other expropriating Commissioner preferred
to vest the mines in a series of District Coal Corporations
of capitaUst shareholders, limited as to dividend, and
working under public control, with a restricted participa-
tion of the men in the administration. Five Commissioners,
including all three coal -owners, whilst agreeing to the
Nationalisation of Minerals, refused to contemplate any
substantial change in the w;orking of the mines, least of
all any effective sharing of the workmen in the administra-
tion ; though even this capitahst minority gave hp-homage
to the principle by recommending the formation of purely
Advisory Pit and District Committees.
The Government, which had continued in administrative
and financial control of all the collieries of the United
Kingdom, whilst agreeing to adopt, in the spirit and in the
letter, the terms of Mr. Justice Sankey's first Report, took
no steps to bring it into effect, and left the local mine-owners
and miners' Unions to adjust for themselves the hours and
new rates of pay which it involved. Suddenly, a few weeks
before the new arrangements were to come into force, the
Coal Controller issued an order that no increase of rates was to
82
522 Thirty Years' Growth
exceed lo per cent — a patent blunder, as it was the average
reduction of output that Mr, Justice Sankey had estimated
at 10 per cent, and it was the actual reduction in each
district that had to be compensated for. The Yorkshire
Miners' Association had almost completed its arrangements
with the Yorkshire mine-owners for a higher percentage of
increase when the Government prohibition was received.
The result was an angry strike which stopped the whole
Yorkshire coalfield for several weeks, and spread to Notting-
hamshire. In the end the Government had to withdraw
its mistaken prohibition ; and the increase of rates, in
Yorkshire as elsewhere, was, as the miners had asked, made
as nearly as possible proportionate to the expected local
reduction in output caused by the reduction of hours. The
hasty action on both sides and the misunderstandings due
to imperfect knowledge, or imperfect expression, lost tlie
nation some four miUion tons of coal, and cost the Yorkshire
Miners' Association about £356,000.
In October 1919 Mr. Lloyd George announced that whilst
the Government would propose the nationalisation of
mining royalties, and some undefined " trustification " of
the mines by districts, there would be no adoption of Mr.
Justice Sankey 's Report. The Miners' Federation refused
to accept anything in the nature of capitalist " trustifica-
tion," and called in vain on the Government to fulfil its
pledge to carry out the Report. In December 1919 the
Federation, in conjunction with the Labour Party, the
ParUamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress,
and the Co-operative Union, began a campaign of propa-
ganda in favour of the Nationalisation of the Coal Supply,
the effect of which, industrially and poUtically, has yet to
become manifest. We have to break off the story in the middle
of a critical period.
The Railwaymen
Another great industry, that of the operating staff of
the railway system — scarcely mentioned in the first edition
Rise of the Railwaymen 523
of our History — has come forcibly to the front. Right down
to tlie end of the nineteenth century, indeed, the railway
guards and signalmen, engine-drivers and firemen, shunters
and porters, mechanics and labourers — though • they
numbered something like 5 per cent of all the male manual-
working wage-earners — played hardly any part in the
Trade IJnion Movement. Scattered in small numbers all over
the country, and divided among themselves by differences
of grade, conditions, and pay, they long seemed incapable
of organisation as a vocation. For a whole generation
after the estabUshment of railways no one appears to
have thought Trade Unionism any more permissible among
their employees than among the soldiers or the pohce. In
1865 an attempt to establish " The Railway Working Men's
Provident Benefit Society " — which soon became virtually
a Trade Union — by Charles Bassett Vincent, a clerk in the
Railway Clearing House, was ruthlessly crushed by summary
dismissals. In the same year an Association of Engine-
drivers and Firemen on the North-Eastem Railway actually
started a strike, but perished of the attempt. Not until
the end of 1871 was a lasting Trade Union estabhshed, and
then only by the assistance of Michael Bass, M.P., a large
railway shareholder, by whose long-continued and entirely
disinterested financial and other help the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants struggled into being, with
Frederick Evans as its first effective secretary. Other
societies followed, of local or sectional character ; but even
in 1892, after twenty years of organisation, and various
abortive strikes, there were fewer than 50,000 raiiwajrmen
in any sort of Trade Union, or less than one in seven of the
persons employed.^
1 The other railwaymen 's Unions are the Belfast and Dublin Loco-
motive Engine-drivers' and Firemen's Trade Union, founded in 1872, and
still existing (1920) with a few hundred members; the Associated Society
of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, founded in 1880, a powerful
sectional society with 33,000 members, which long maintained a jealous
rivalry with the Amalgamated ; the Railway Clerks' Association, founded
in 1897, remaining very small for a whole decade, absorbing in 191 1
the Railway Telegraph Clerks' Association, founded 1897, with 85,000
524 Thirty Years* Growth
The objects of such railwaymen's societies as existed
were for many years confined to the protection of members
from " victimisation " or other tyranny ; to the provision
of friendly benefits ; and to spasmodic attempts to get
accidents prevented or compensated for, and hours of
labour reduced. Wages questions took up little of the
attention of the railway Unions of these years ; but strikes
on particular railways — sometimes of particular grades or
at particular centres only of a single railway — now and then
occurred ; usually in resentment of some act of t3a-anny,
or against some specially oppressive hours of labour, and
often without the prior approval of the Executive Committee.
In 1890 the Amalgamated Society for the first time launched
an aggressive policy, mainly as regards the hours of labour,
which were indeed scandalous.^ A prolonged strike for
a shorter working day on the Scottish lines at Christmas
1890 ended in failure, and the merging of the remnant of
members; the Irish Railway Workers' Trade Union, founded in 1910,
tiny and insignificant ; the National Union of Railway Clerks, formed in
1913, a tiny local body, arising out of the suspension of the Sheffield
Branch of the Railway C'erks' Association, temporary only.
We may mention the Scottish Society of Railway Servants, founded
in the eighteen-eighties, merged in the Amalgamated Society in 1892 ; the
United Signalmen and Pointsmen, founded in 1880, merged in the N.U.R.
in 191 3 ; the General Railway Workers' Union, founded in 1889, merged
in the N.U.R., 1913.
For the development of Trade Unionism in the railway world, and
the various controversies, we have drawn mainly on the numerous reports
and other pubUcations of the Unions themselves ; the Railway Review
and the Railway Clerk (the pleading for the Companies being found in the
Railway News, subsequently incorporated in the Railway Gazette) ; Trade
Unionism on the Railways, its History and Problems, by G. D. H. Cole
and R. Page Arnot (1917) ; the Souvenir History, published by the Amalga-
mated Society of Railway Servants (1910) ; Men and Rails, by Rowland
Kenney (1913) ; Der Arbeitskampf der englischen Eisenbahner im Jahre
igii, by C. Leubuscher, 1913; the various pubhcations on the legal
proceedings, for which see the next chapter ; the Reports of the Board
of Trade on Railway Accidents, hours of labour, etc., of the Select Com-
mittee of 1892, and the Special Committee of Inquiry of 191 1 ; An Intro-
duction to Trade Unionism, by G. D. H. Cole (1918) ; From Engine-cleaner
to Privy Councillor [J. H. Thomas], b)' J. F. Moir Bussy (1917).
"^Slavery on Scottish Railways (1888) ; The Scottish Railway Strike, by
James Mavor (1891).
"All Grades Movement " 525
the Scottish Society of Railway Servants in the larger
Union. But it aroused public attention and led to an
effective exposure by a Select Committee of the House of
Commons in 1891-92. As a result the Board of Trade was
given certain statutory powers in 1893 to remedy this
tyranny — powers of which, unfortunately, little use was
made. Not for nine years afterwards did the Board of
Trade even call upon the railway companies for a return
showing in how many cases men were kept on duty in excess
of twelve hours at a stretch. Four-fifths of the railwaymen
were still outside the ranks of Trade Unionism and could
therefore be both oppressed by their employers and flouted
by the Government Department. Their very right to
combine was denied. Sir George Findlay, the General
Manager of the London and North- Western Railway, voiced
the common opinion of the Companies when he declared
that " you might as well have a Trade Union or an ' Amalga-
mated Society ' in the Army, where disciphne has to be kept
at a very high standard, as have it on railways."
In December 1896, indeed, a determined attempt was
made to root out Trade Unionism in Sir George Findlay' s
own railway company by the dismissal of men discovered
to be Trade Unionists. Through the activity of the Society
these victims found influential friends, who by pubUc and
private pressure compelled their reinstatement. The excite-
ment caused by this incident had some share in swelling the
membership of the Amalgamated Society, which doubled
its numbers during the year 1897 ; and made its first big
stride in the " All Grades Movement " in. that year. Previous
movements had been local and sectional, and nearly always
in the interests of particular grades. For the' first time all
the railway companies were approached simultaneously,
with a request for improvements in all grades from one end
of the service to the other — a reduction of the time of duty,
so as to bring the working day down to ten, and for some
grades eight hours ; extra payments for overtime, and a
uniform advance of 2s. per week for all grades except those
526 Thirty Years Growth
for whom an eight hours day was sought. The Companies
refused even to consider this very moderate request, and
nearly a decade was to pass — a decade of slow building up
of the organisation, first under Mr. Richard Bell and Mr
J. E. Williams, and then under Mr. J H. Thomas — before
the Trade Unions of railwaymen were able to compel a
hearing for their case.^
Meanwhile the Amalgamated Society of Railway
Servants, and with it the whole Trade Union Movement,
suffered in the law courts a temporary set-back. An im-
pulsive strike on the Taff Vale Railway in South Wales,
accompanied b}' extensive and successful picketing, was not
countenanced by the Executive, but was eventually en-
dorsed by its decision to take up the men's case ; and the
Railway Company sued the Society for the loss occasioned
by what were alleged to be, the unlawful acts of its ofhcers.
To the surprise of the lawyers, as well as of the public, the
judges held that — in spite of what had seemed the explicit
provisions of the Trade Union Acts of 1871-76 — a Trade
Union could be made answerable in damages for all the acts
of its officials, central or local, as if it were a corporate body,
whilst still being denied the privileges of a corporate body.
The strike and legal proceedings cost the Society from first
to last nearly £50,000, whilst the danger to the corporate
funds of all Trade Unions that the decision revealed put a
damper on even the best justified strikes until, under per-
sistent Trade Union pressure, strengthened by the entry
into the House of Commons of a reinforced Labour Party,
the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 restored the law to its
state prior to the judicial decisions of 1902.
The railwaymen could then renew their " All Grades
Movement " which the Companies in January 1907 again
declined to consider, steadfastly refusing any recognition
of the men's Trade Unions, and callously denying their
^ The North IC^istcrn Railway Company was so far an exception that,
already in 1890, it was willing to receive representations from the Trade
Union.
Conciliation Boards 527
grievances.^ Ballots of the membership of the Amalga-
mated Society and the General Union decided on a strike
by 80,026 to 1857 votes, and in November 1907 a national
stoppage was at hand when Mr. Lloyd George intervened
as President of the Board of Trade, compelled the Com-
panies to hsten to reason, and persuaded both parties to
accept an elaborate scheme of Local and Central Concihation
Boards, composed of equal numbers representing manage-
ment and men, with an impartial chairman and authority
to decide on wages and hours. These Conciliation Boards,
unsatisfactory as they proved, represented a real triumph.
For the first time the autocracy of the railway management
was broken. There was, it is true, still no express recogni-
tion of the Trade Unions, but the men's representatives were
to be freely elected on each railway by all the employees
grouped according to their grades ; and these elected
representatives met the management on professedly equal
terms. The elections showed how thoroughly justified was
the claim of the Railwaymen's Trade Unions that they were
voicing the wishes of practically the whole body of railway-
men. In spite of strenuous efforts by the management on
most of the lines, and of the unfortunate jealousies among
the different societies, in nearly all cases the nominees of
one or other of the Unions were elected, often by large
majorities. For the next few years the Amalgamated Society
and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and
* A notable feature was a statistical census of the wages of the rail-
waymen, compiled by the Amalgamated Society through its membership,
for the presentation of which Mr. Richard Bellr the Secretary-, obtained
the services of a Cambridge graduate, Mr. W. T. Layton. This " Green
Book " revealed that 38 per cent received 20s. per week or under, and
49.8 per cent between 21s. and 30s. ; with atrocious hours. Attempts to
discredit these statistics were made by the Companies, it being in particular
constantly suggested that nearly all the 100,000 paid under £1 per week
were boys. It took the Board of Trade four years to compile and publish
an official wage-census for October 1907, which eventually revealed that
96,000 adult railwaj'^men were receiving 19s. per week or less (Board of
Trade Report, February 191 2), an extraordinarily exact confirmation of
the much-abused census taken by the Union. See Men and Rails, by
Rowland Kenney, 1913.
528 Thirty Years' Growth
Firemen were busy in fighting the cases of the various grades
through the ConciUation Boards, and in secuiing thereby
many small increases of wages and reductions of hours.
But matters did not go smoothly. The Companies, for the
most part, pursued a policy of obstruction and postpone-
ment, delaying the awards, quibbling about their application,
and in some cases deliberately evading their terms, notably
by inventing new grades to which men could be appointed
at lower rates of pay than those prescribed. The " im-
partial " chairmen, moreover, differed among themselves
in the assumptions on which they proceeded, and some of
the awards caused great resentment. Meanwhile the cost
of living was steadily rising, and railwaymen as a whole
were falling further behind other organised workers. Pro-
gress was delayed in 1909-10 by a new set-back which the
Amalgamated Society suffered in the law courts, in the
prolonged litigation carried by one of its members, with
capitahst assistance, right up to the House of Lords, by
which the participation of any Trade Union in political
activity was declared invalid — a piece of " judge-made
law " to which we shall recur, and for which the Government
and Parliament at first refused all redress. Suddenly, in
August 1911, the pot boiled over. There was a spirit of
revolt in the Labour world. In June and July the seamen
and the dockers had struck, and stopped the port of London.
There was an outburst of " unauthorised " railway strikes
at Manchester, Liverpool, and some other big towns, "and a
general demand for a national strike. The Executives of
the four principal railwaymen's Unions, for once acting
closely in concert, gave the Companies twenty-four hours
to decide whether they would consent to meet the men's
representatives, or face a national stoppage. Once more
the Government intervened, Mr. Asquith offering a Royal
Commission of indefinite duration and issue, merely to pro-
pose amendments in the scheme of Conciliation Boards, and
at the same time definitely informing the men — a fact which
they judiciously refrained from publishing — that the Govern-
The Railway Strike 529
ment would not hesitate to use the troops to prevent the
commerce of the country from being interfered with.^ The
Unions refused the illusory offer, and a national strike
began, which, although far from universal, was sufficient
to disorganise the whole railway service — as many as
200,000 men stopping work — and was rapidly bringing
industry to a standstill. At the instance of Mr. Winston
Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, an overpowering
display was made with the troops, which were sent to
Manchester and other places, without requisition by the
civil authorities, at the mere request of the Companies. In
fact, a policy of repression had been decided on, and blood-
shed was near at hand. In vain did the Union leaders ask
Mr. Asquith, as Prime Minister, to take steps to obtain a
meeting between the Companies' managers and the Union
representatives. Wiser counsels seem to have prevailed in
the Cabinet, which peremptorily instructed the Companies
to let their General Managers meet the men's representatives
face to face at the Board of Trade. For just upon twelve
hours these managers, thus coerced, negotiated with four
representatives of the Unions, together with Mr. Henderson
and Mr. J. R. MacDonald of the ParUamentary Labour
Party. At last an agreement was made — the first ever
concluded between the Railway Companies as a whole and
the Trade Unions of their employees — for an ending of the
strike, on terms of complete reinstatement of the strikers ;
an immediate consideration -by the ConciHation Boards of
all grievances ; and a prompt investigation by a bipartite
Royal Commission of the dissatisfaction with these Boards,
and the best way of amending the scheme. ^ When the
^ This intimation undoubtedly meant that the Government had
decided, as the Times expressly said, to use the Royal Engineers to run
trains — a decision to be compared with that at once announced in the
national railway strike of 1919, that no use would be made of the troops
actually to run trains, nor would the Post Office officials be asked to do
raiiwaymen's work, nor persons on State Unemployment Benefit be called
upon to accept employment on the railways. The change in attitude
of the Government in eight years is significant.
2 The committee consisted, for the first time, of equal numbers of
persons appointed as being representative of employers and workmexi
530 Thirty Years' Growth
Commission reported — it was ultimately termed a Special
Committee of Inquiry — the Railwaymen's Union once more
asked the Companies to meet them for negotiation, which
the Companies again refused to do. On the Unions resolv-
ing to ballot their members as to a national strike, the House
of Commons set a new precedent by passing, at the instance
of the Government, a resolution formally recommending a
joint meeting, whereupon the Companies gave way. At the
meeting that ensued a new scheme of Conciliation Boards
was jointly agreed to, amending the 1907 scheme generally
on the hne of the Special Committee's report, but intro-
ducing most of the other modifications that the Unions
thought necessary. The machinery was made more rapid
in action, and the scope of the Boards was extended. Most
important of all, the men's side of each Board was allowed
to choose as secretary "a person not in the employ of the
C ompany ; and it accordingly became possible for a Trade
Union official to take up this work, and that not only for
a single grade but, by acting for several Boards, simultane-
ously for all grades. This was not " recognition " in form,
but at any rate the Trade Union official was let in. During
the next two years, in spite of incredible obstructions,
quibblings, and evasions by the Companies, a number of
small improvements in the terms of service were obtained
from the Boards for all the grades on practically all the lines.
A result of this joint working of even greater importance
was the merging, in 1913, after prolonged negotiations, of
three out of the four principal societies of manual railway
workers^ — the Amalgamated, the General Union, and the
respectively — two on each side — none of them directly concerned with
the industry, with an " impartial chairman," all five being selected by
the Government. For the Companies, Sir T. RatcUflfe Elhs and Mr.
C. G. Beale ; for the workmen, Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., and Mr.
John Burnett ; the Chairman was Sir David Harrel, K.C.B., an official of
the Irish Government.
^ The Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, having
now 51,000 members, unfortunately stood aloof ; and the annals of
railway Trade Unionism were, down to 1918, largely made up of the
wrangling between this society and the National Union of Railwaymen.
The N.U.R. 53i
United Pointsmen and Signalmen — into a new Trade Union
upon a carefully revised basis, under the title of the
National Union of Railwaymen.
The " New Model " for Trade Union structure thus
deliberately adopted merits attention. In contrast with
what we have called the " New Model," in 1851 of the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, that of 1913 represents
an attempt to include, in a single " amalgamated " Union,
all the various " crafts " and grades of workers engaged in
a single industry throughout the whole kingdom. The
declared object of the National Union of Railwaymen is
" to secure the complete organisation of all workers
employed on or in connection with any railway in the
United Kingdom." It thus definitely negatives both
" sectionahsm " and " localism " in favour of " Industrial
Unionism." Indeed, it may be suggested that the new
constitution passes, by definition, even beyond the " In-
dustrial Unionism," to which the most advanced section of
Trade Unionists were aspiring, into what has been termed
" Employmental Unionism," in that it seeks to enrol in one
Union, not merely all sections of railway workers, but
actually all who are employed by any railway undertaking —
thus including, not only the engineering and wood-working
mechanics in the railway engineering workshops,^ but also
^ The mechanics and labourers in the railway companies' engineering
and repairing shops, though many of them have always been members of
the various engineering and other craft Unions, long remained relatively
unorganised. Many of the less skilled were enrolled by the General
Railway Workers' Union in 1889-1913 ; and when this was merged in the
National Union of Railwaymen, with its broadened constitution, many
more of the mechanics and labourers in the railway workshops were
recruited, and the N.U.R. sought to obtain for them the advances and
other benefits for which it was pressing. The railway companies disputed
the right of the N.U.R. to speak for the " shopmen," and the claim pro-
voked the resentment of the craft Unions, which were now paying increased
attention to the organisation of men of their crafts in the railway work-
shops. Repeated attempts have been made to arrive at some " line of
demarcation " or other compromise, by which this rivalry between Unions
could be brought to an end ; but hitherto without success. The quarrel
is inflamed by a conflict of Trade Union doctrine. The engineers, boiler-
makers, carpenters, and other trades assert that organisation should be
532 Thirty Years' Growth
the cooks, waiters, and housemaids at the fifty-five railway
hotels ; the sailors and firemen on board the railway com-
panies' fleets of steamers, and (though no trouble has
actually arisen about them) the compositors, lithographers,
and bookbinders whom the railway printing works employ
in the production of tickets, time-tables, office stationery, and
advertisement posters ; even the men whom one, at least,
of the largest companies keeps in constant employment
at the manufacture of crutches and wooden legs for the
disabled members of its staff. This all-inclusiveness has,
/ since 19 13, brought the National Union of Railwaymen
into conflict with many other Trade Unions ; and the
question of the proper lines of demarcation has so far
remained unsettled. The principal new feature in con-
stitutional structure was the estabhshment of a distinct
legislature — the Annual General Meeting — consisting, in
addition to the President and General Secretary, of sixty
representatives elected by the membership in geographical
constituencies of approximately equal size. Subordinate
to the Annual General Meeting (which can be summoned
specially when required) is the Executive Committee of
the President, General Secretary, and twenty-four other
members, the latter being severally elected by the device
of the Single Transferable Vote by each of four prescribed
departments of members in each of six gigantic geographical
constituencies; one-third of such* representatives retiring
annually, and after each triennial term of service, becoming
inehgible for three years, whilst the Branches to which they
belong also become unable to nominate representatives for
a like term. The Executive Committee, which, Uke the
Annual General Meeting, consists of working railwa3TTien,
paid only for their days of service, meets quarterly and
by craft, whatever may be the industry in which the craftsman is working.
The advocates of the " New Model " of the N.U.R. assert the superiority
of organisation by industry, including in each industry all the crafts
actually concerned. See Trade Unionism on the Railways, its History and
Problems, by G. D. H. Cole and R. Page Arnot, 191 7.
A New Advance 533
appoints four sectional sub-committees, which must also
meet at least quarterly. Noteworthy, too, is the District
Council, which — constitutionally only a voluntary federation
of geographically adjacent Branches for propagandist and
purely consultative purposes — has, with an unofficial
National Federation of District Councils, developed into an
active " caucus " of the more energetic members for dis-
cussing and promoting " forward movements " in the
Annual General Meeting, and " organising " the elections to
the Executive Committee.
With such a constitution, and the administration of
extensive friendly benefits in a society now approaching
half a million members, it is inevitable that the Executive
Committee should wield extensive powers. It initiates and
conducts, all trade movements, and can therefore call a
national strike, even without a ballot vote ; and whilst it
may take a ballot vote at any time on any question, the
rules expressly provide that it is not to be bound by the
members' decision. Originally the Executive Committee
had power also " to settle " any dispute ; but this was
withdrawn by resolutions of the Annual General Meetings
of 1915 and 1916, which required all settlements to be
reported to itself for ratification. In practice very large
powers, both of o£&ce management and of negotiation, are
necessarily exercised by the six salaried officers, the President,
the General Secretary, and the four Assistant Secretaries,
each of whom is responsible for a separate branch of the
Union's*work. They have, however, not been able to pre-
vent a series of " unauthorised " strikes, local or sectional in
character.
At the beginning of 1914 everything pointed to a further
forward movement by the N.U.R. Its Annual General
Meeting cordially accepted the Miners' proposal to unite
with them and the Transport Workers in the so-called Triple
Alliance.* Moreover, its desires now began to go beyond
improvements in wages and hours. Its representatives had,
for twenty years, sometimes moved and always supported
534 Thirty Years' Growth
the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress in favour of
the NationaUsation of Railways. In 1913 the Railway
Clerks' Association had gone a step further, and had asked
also for participation in control. In 1914 the resolution
intended to be submitted on behalf of the N.U.R. declared
that " no system of State Ownership of the railways will be
acceptable to organised railwaymen which does not guarantee
to them their full political and social rights, allow them a due
measure of control and responsibihty in the safe and efficient
working of the railway system, and assure to them a fair
and equitable participation in the increased benefits likely
to accrue from a more economical and scientific administra-
tion." Here we have the first expressions of the desire for
participation in the management of the railways.^ From
that time forward the demand has become ever more
expHcit and determined. Meanwhile, however, the first
step was plainly the drastic amendment of the scheme of
Conciliation Boards ; and proposals were under considera-
tion when war broke out. In marked contrast with their
previous action, the Railway Companies were actually
meeting the Union representatives in a joint committee of
seven a side. The growth in membership of the National
Union of Railwaymen at that date to over 300,000, and
its entry into the " Triple Alliance " of miners, railwaymen,
and transport workers, had, in fact, at last compelled the
Companies, in fact, to concede " recognition," although they
denied at the time that they were so doing. During the
war the actual alteration of the scheme was to rStaain in
abeyance, but the Executive Committee came in 1915 to
a provisional agreement with the Companies as to certain
amendments, which the Annual General Meeting of that
year considered inadequate and refused to sanction. Mean-
while, in view of the rising cost of living, successive war
* The Presidential Address at the Annual Conference of the Railway
Clerks' Association in 1913 had suggested that the representatives of the
railway workers should constitute one-third of a National Railway Board
— a proposal that did not content the larger Union.
The Eight Hours' Day 535
bonuses, uniform throughout the Kingdom for all grades
of the traffic staff, were obtained from the President of the
Board of Trade — the cost, in effect, falhng on the Govern-
ment under its arrangement for guaranteeing to the share-
holders the net revenue of 1913 — amounting altogether to
33s. per week for men, i6s. 6d. per week for women and
boys, and 8s. 3d. per week for girls, thus more than doubling
the average pre-war wages. The Government, moreover,
promised sympathetic consideration of the men's demand
for an Eight Hours' Day immediately on the termination
of the war.
When the Armistice in November 1918 brought hostilities
to an end, negotiations were at once begun for a settlement
of the outstanding questions. The National Union of
Railwaymen, in more friendly conjunction with the Associ-
ated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, whilst
gaining advances fuUy equivalent to the increase in the
cost of living, had secured in principle not only recogni-
tion, but also the valuable right of entering into negotiation
with the united management of aU the railways, instead of
always being referred to the several companies ; and even
more important, it had obtained, in the uniform war bonuses,
the basis of national rates of wages for the several grades,
instead of rates and classes of workers varying from company
to company. It was now to secure, without an effort, the
Eight Hours' Day, to come into operation on February i,
1919, which the Government, not even consulting the Rail-
way Companies, singly or collectively, in December 1918,
conceded in principle without reduction of wages, whilst the
necessary reclassification of workers and adjustment of
times and wages on a national system became the subject
of prolonged and difficult negotiations between the Railway
Executive Committee and the two principal Unions.
The negotiations for " standardisation " which neces-
sarily involved the amalgamation of the uniform war
bonus with the varjdng basic rate, were dragged out by the
Government from February to the end of August, to the
536 Thirty Years' Growth
growing irritation of the railwaymen. What occurred, as
Ministers subsequently confessed, or rather boasted, was
that, beginning actually in February, the Government made
extensive secret preparations to break the strike which it
was foreseen would occur when the Government's decisions
were made known. The railwaymen themselves confidently
expected, seeing that the cost of living had not fallen, but was
ofiicially certified, in September 1919, at 115 per cent above
that of July 1914, that their rates would be " standardised
upwards," so as both to adopt the scales of the best com-
panies for all the staff, and to include the whole of the
war bonus. But this automatic inclusion of the war bonus
in the Standard Rate, which some trades had already secured,
was exactly what the leading industrial employers were, for
their own trades, anxious to prevent. They counted, indeed,
on bringing about throughout British industry, during 1919
or" 1920, irrespective of any change in the cost of living, a
general reduction of the " swollen " wages of war-time ; and
there was a prevalent feeling among them, which is known
to have been shared by some, at least, of the Ministers, and
quite frankly expressed, that a big "fight with the Trade
Unions " was inevitable, and that it would be " better to
get it over " before industry had generally restarted under
peace conditions. How far Sir Auckland Geddes, who as
President of the Board of Trade was responsible for the
negotiations, and his brother, Sir Eric Geddes, who as
Minister of Transport took over the work, shared this view,
and allowed it to inspire their official action, has not been
revealed. The historian can only note that the Government
proceedings appear consistent with this hj^pothesis. The
Government deliberately separated from the mass of rail-
waymen the locomotive drivers and firemen, whose services
were regarded as specially indispensable, and whose allegiance
was divided between the two rival Unions. In August
acceptable terms were proposed for these two classes,
which conceded not only the absorption of the whole war
bonus in the new scale of wages, but also certain further
The " Definitive " Offer 537
increases of pay, coming near to the Union's full claims.
Such a concession, it was subsequently noted, was admirably
calculated, in the event of a strike, to detach the drivers and
firemen from their fellow-members ; to divide the two
Unions, and to arouse expectations in the other grades
which would make it practically certain that they would
indignantly refuse the offer that was to be made in a few
weeks. When the " definite" decision of the Government
was sent to the Union, in a letter in which Sir Auckland
Geddes with his own hand altered the word to " definitive,"
as if in order to ensure an explosion, it was found that by
the new scale, beginning on January i, 1920, every grade
was to suffer a reduction off existing earnings, varying from
only a shilling or two per week in some cases up to as much
as sixteen shillings per week — the new standard rate of the
porter, for instance, being fixed at 40s., as compared with
the 5 IS. or 53s. that he was actually receiving, or with the
60s. per week for which the Union had asked. No explana-
tion was given by the brothers Geddes that what was in-
tended was that there should be on January i, 1920, no
reduction whatever in the men's earnings, and that the
Government's policy was (as subsequently stated by Mr.
Lloyd George, but only on the very morning of the strike,
which was the first revelation of it) that there should never
be any reduction at all unless the cost of living fell for over
three months below no per cent in excess of pre-war prices,
and that (as was announced only in the Government adver-
tisements on the eighth day of the strike) the future " sliding
scale," which had never been definitely formulated, would
be allowed to work upwards as well as downwards. Unless
the intention of the " definitive " offer was then and there
to provoke an indignant strike, why was no hint of this
" policy for 1920 " included ; why was it left to be only
incidentally revealed, in such a way as not to be easily
understood, in the final personal discussion with the Prime
Minister ; and, seeing that the Minister of Food himself had
publicly announced that what was probable, from January
538 Thirty Years' Growth
1920, was not a fall but a further rise in the cost of living,
why was the alarming suggestion of a reduction to 40s. per
week ever made at all ? It is almost impossible to avoid
the inference that the Government, which certainly decided
the date and the issues, decided also the strike itself, with
a view to " beating the Union," in order to get a free hand
for railway reorganisation without the necessity of consult-
ing the operatives ; in order, probably, to fit in with the
general capitalist project of a scaling down of the " swollen "
war-wages ; and, as some say, in order to supply Mr. Lloyd
George with a useful " election stunt," with which, in the eyes
of the middle class, irretrievably to damage the Labour Party.
Whether intentionally on the part of the Ministers, or
by reason of an amazing maladroitness in their negotiations,
what had been foreseen and expected by the Government,
and for six months secretly prepared for, actually came to
pass. On Wednesday, September 24, the Executive Council
of the National Union of Railwaymen issued orders for a
national strike to begin at midnight on Friday, September
26, unless countermanded by telegraph. So little had the
Union intended or contemplated such action that absolutely
no notice of the crisis had been given to the Miners' Federa-
tion or the Transport Workers' Federation, who were the
railwaymen's colleagues in the Triple Alliance ; and the
Union had only some ;^3000 available in cash. Efforts were
made by the men to avert the stoppage, which it was
recognised would be a national calamity. The Executive
Council sought and obtained long interviews with the
Prime Minister himself on Thursday, and even on the
Friday morning ; and the verbatim reports of these discus-
sions reveal [a] that the Government showed no inclination
to meet the men's case — Sir Eric Geddes peremptorily inter-
vening at one point even to prevent a criticism of the
" definitive " new scale being adduced ; (6) that the Govern-
ment did not even then set forth what subsequently turned
out to have been the proposal tliat the Ministry of Transport
had really intended to make (unless, indeed, we are to
The Great Strike 539
assume that the " definitive " offer was silently changed in
the course of the strike). Again, it can only be inferred that
Mr. Lloyd George either did not wish to prevent the strike
or else was quite exceptionally below his usual level of
lucidity in explanation of any scheme that he wished to have
accepted. What the Prime Minister did was immediately
to denounce to the public the National Union of Railway-
men as engaged in an anarchist conspiracy !
The nine days' stoppage that ensued was, in many
respects, the most remarkable industrial conflict that we
have yet seen. Half a milhon railwa5nTien left their work at
midnight on the 26th of September, the Associated Society
of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen at once joining
loyally with the N.U.R., and very nearly every member
of either Union coming out. The men on the Irish railways
v/ere directed to remain at work. Never before had there
been so nearly a complete stoppage of the railway service
from one end of Great Britain to the other. It is to be
noted that the third Union, the Railway Clerks' Association
(which had come to include the Clerical, Administrative,
and Supervisory Staffs), directed its members to remain
absolutel}^ neutral, and not to do any of the strikers' work.
The various Unions of Post Office employees sought and
obtained an official decision that they were not to be called
upon to do any service hitherto done by men on strike.
The Government, which sent soldiers to guard some of the
railway stations,^ hastened to announce pubHcly — in signifi-
cant contrast with its decision of 1912 — that in no case
would the troops be employed to run trains. For the first
time the Government found itself hable to pay unemploy-
ment benefit to aU other workers who were stopped as a
result of the strike ; and for the enoimous extension of the
State Unemplo5niient Benefit that was expected to be re-
quired, arrangements were promulgated under which the
^ It was reported that in some cases the soldiers fraternised with the
pickets and were promptly withdrawn to barracks ; and the Cabinet was
certainly warned, by high military authority, against attempting to use
the troops.
540 Thirty Years' Growth
Benefit would be issued by each employer to his own wage-
earners, when these were thrown idle by the strike ; and that
whilst such persons might be called upon to take tem-
porary employment in handUng food supplies, they would
not be required to accept service on the railways themselves.
There was, in spite of wild newspaper exaggerations,
practically no disorder and no attempt to injure property.
Except in a very few cases, in which local mishandling of
the situation by the authorities led to resentment and
misunderstanding, the Executive Council's order that the
horses were not to be allowed to suffer was cordially acted
on by the men. The Government was allowed, without
attempt at obstruction, to bring at once into operation the
elaborate arrangements it had long been preparing, for
ensuring the regular supply of London and other large
towns with milk and other foodstuffs by means of an ex-
tensive motor-lorry service. Volunteers for railway work
were called for, and with the aid of the small remnant of
non-unionists a tiny trickle of trains was set going, which
provided for the local passenger service in London and some
other cities ; and gradually accomplished one or two long-
distance trains per day, which carried the mails and were
crowded with venturous passengers. What stopped almost
completely was the mineral and heavy goods traffic, and
by the end of the week so many industries had come to the
end of their fuel, and so many coalpits were short of waggons
and of room at the pithead, that, whilst nearly 400,000
workmen in collieries and factories were already idle, the
next week would have seen hterally millions unemploj^ed.
Meanwhile, in spite of press reports to the contrarj^ the
Union Executives knew that, whilst a few men returned to
work, each day more joined the strikers, so that there were
actually a greater number signing the book at the end than
at the beginning of the struggle. But the National Union
of Railwaymen found considerable difficulty in realising
from its investments, and in making locally available at a
couple of thousand centres, sufficient cash to pay immedi-
Co-operative Help 541
ately the half a million pounds of strike pay that was
required ; and only the prompt and cordial assistance of
the Co-operative WTiolesale Society's printing department,
which got out the necessary supply of cheques in mar-
vellously quick time, and of the Co-operative Wholesale
Society's Bank, which made the N.U.R. cheques payable at
the several Co-operative Societies themselves, averted a
breakdown. Food was in sotne cases refused to the strikers
by shopkeepers ; and it may be that it was only the prompt
assistance of the Co-operative Societies, which agreed to
honour vouchers issued by the local strike committees, that
prevented the Government from putting in operation a
project of starving out the railwaymen's families by with-
drawing their ration cards or withholding the food suppUes
under Government control. One blow below the belt the
Government did strike in arbitrarily commanding the
withholding from the strikers of a whole week's pay which
they had earned by their service prior to the stoppage, and
which it was the custom of the companies always to keep
in hand for a week by way of security against theft or
embezzlement. This had never been done in any previous
railway strike. Whether or not the railwajmien had
broken any legal contract of service by giving only three
days' notice of their strike, is not clear — the point appears
never to have been raised or decided, — but in any case the
companies had only a right to sue each man for any .damages
that might be showTi to be caused by such a breach of
contract ; and the Government had plainly no legal warrant
for becoming the judge in its own cause, and itself arbitrarily
assessing the damages due from each man at precisely one
week's earnings. This action, coupled with the evasive
and ever-changing terms of the Government's wage pro-
posals, and the campaign of abuse that the Government
organised throughout the press — personally directed by
Sir WilHam Sutherland, one of the Prime Minister's secre-
taries— had a great influence in rallying the Trade Union
world in support of the railwaymen.
542 Thirty Years* Growth ^
The " publicity campaign," by which, for the first time
in an industrial struggle, a persistent organised appeal was
made by both sides to public opinion, was, indeed, the most
remarkable feature of the struggle. At the outset the
Government, in spite of the outspoken advocacy of the
Daily Herald, had it all its own way. The public, seriously
inconvenienced by the stoppage, was told by nearly every
newspaper in the Kingdom — daily supplied by a Govern-
ment office with a lengthy bulletin of " Strike News " — that
the strike was the result of an " anarchist " conspiracy
among the railwaymen ; that the Union had wantonly
broken off negotiations without cause because it positively
wished to " hold up " the whole community ; that the
Government had not really intended any reduction of wages
at all, and that the figure of 40s. had reference only to the
contingency of the cost of living reverting to what it was
before the war ; that, in fact, the Government were posi-
tively doubling the railwaymen's wages, and that the men,
reahsing this, and discovering how they had been deceived
by their Executive Council, were resuming their duties at all
points. To counteract this Government propaganda, the
Daily Herald made the most enterprising arrangements for
getting its issue distributed all over England, and more than
doubled its circulation, whilst the National Union of Rail-
waymen employed its own Pubhcity Department, utilising
for this purpose the Labour Research Department.^ A
number of competent writers, cartoonists, and statisticians
belonging to the Labour Party placed their services in this
way at the Research Department's disposal, so that the
Executive Council was able, within a couple of days, to pour
forth a stream of articles, letters, speeches, and cartoons, for
which the newspapers generally accorded space. ^ Every
move of the Government, and every statement that it issued,
* For an account of this Department see pp. 571-2.
* A notable feature was a revolt of the compositors and printers'
assistants, who threatened to strike and stop the newspapers altogether
unless the railwaymen were allowed to present their case and unless
abusive posters were abandoned.
The Power of Publicity 543
was immediately countered by an appropriate answer. When
Mr. Lloyd George supplied a message denouncing the strikers
which appeared on the film in every cinema, Mr. J. H.
Thomas was himself filmed in the act of delivering a cogent
reply. But the Union's Publicity Department found the
space given by the newspapers inadequate, and started
placing full-page advertisements in the Times and other
newspapers, in which the Government's equivocations and
evasions as to the wages offered were effectively exposed.
The Government followed suit, and presently the two
advertisements appeared on successive pages, with the
unforeseen result that the Government's statement of its
proposals to the men was detected in changing from day to
day as the strike continued, growing progressively more
favourable to the men, but professing still to be the " defini-
tive " decision of Sir Auckland Geddes which had provoked
the strike. The outcome of a week's skilfully organised
** publicity " was a steady shifting of public opinion, and
even a distinct change in the newspaper editorials. By the
end of the week the men's case was winning.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the principal Trade Unions
indirectly affected by the railway stoppage, notably the
various sections of Transport Workers, together with
officials or representatives of the Miners, the ParUamentary
Committee, and the Labour Party, had been meeting in
anxious conclave — summoned, it should be stated, by the
Executive of the National Transport Workers' Federation —
with a view to restraining their own members from im-
petuous action in support of the railwaymen, and to bringing
pressure to bear on both parties to secure a settlement. At
first the prospect seemed hopeless. The Government took
up an attitude of defiance. Mr. Lloyd George declared that
he would not enter into any negotiations with the railway-
men's Unions until the men had unconditionally returned
to their duty. A national appeal was made to all the Local
Authorities — not to strengthen the police force by special
constables, as is the constitutional procedure, but to in-
544 Thirty Years* Growth
stitute a " Citizen Guard," in order to repel the forces of
disorder ; a wild use of a term of bad omen, which was
calculated, if not intended, to bring the " class war " into
the streets. It was known that measures of arbitrary con-
fiscation of the Union funds were seriously under considera-
tion, together \vith discriminatory issues of food suppUes.
On the other side, the feeUng of the Trade Unionists was
rising to anger. The position could not well have been
more serious. But the " eleven " — afterwards the " four-
teen " — Trade Union mediators were patient and persistent.
They had long interviews with the railwaymen's Executive.
They had long discussions with the Prime Minister, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Minister of Transport.
They cleared up misunderstandings. They eUminated pro-
vocative expressions. They brought the Government to
admit that there was no present chance of reducing wages.
They got the railwaymen to see that merely to postpone the
issue was to strengthen their grip upon what they were
actually receiving. Notwithstanding the Government's
defiant words, the Trade Union mediators got the railway-
men's Executive Council into prolonged and repeated dis-
cussions at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister and
his colleagues.^ At last, on Sunday morning, October 3,
Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Thomas were closeted together
for the final stage ; the news was immediately flashed all
over the kingdom that the strike was settled, and in the
evening Mr. Thomas announced to a mass meeting of rail-
waymen in the Albert Hall the terms of settlement. These
included an immediate^ resumption of work without victimisa-
tion or recrimination ; payment of the impounded arrears
of wages ; " stabilisation " of existing earnings of all rates
(except where improved) until September 30, 1920 ; negotia-
tions as to " standardisation " and settlement of wage scales
to be begun again, and a settlement to be come to before
^ Railway Dispute, 1919 .' Report to the Labour Movement of Great
Britain by the Committee appointed at the Caxton Hall Conference (National
Transport Workers' Federation).
The Settlement 545
December 31, 1919 ; and the lowest adult railwayman to
be raised forthwith to 51s. per week as a minimum. Before
the end of 1919 it was announced that the Government had
agreed to concede, for the future, that all questions relating
to the conditions of service should be dealt with, not by
the railway companies but by a Central Board of ten mem-
bers (with power to increase b}^ a further one on each side),
five nominees of the National Union of Railwaj'men and
the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fire-
men, and five representatives of the railway management.
In case of disagreement, reference will be made to an Appeal
Board of twelve members, four nominated by these Trade
Unions, four representing the management, and four the
general public, with a chairman nominated by the Govern-
ment. What is specially significant is that it is recognised
that " the public " does not consist merely of the upper and
middle, or of the capitalist and professional classes. Of
the four representatives of the public, two are to be nomi-
nated, respectively, by the Associated Chambers of Com-
merce and the Federation of British Industries, and two,
respectively, by the Parliamentary Committee of the
Trades Union Congress and the Co-operative Union, who
are thus taken to represent the four-fifths of the population
(and therefore of the railway users) who are manual working
wage-earners. At the same time it was conceded that the
Advisory Committee for Railway Management, which
replaces under the Minister of Transport the Railway
Executive Committee, is to include, from the start, three
representatives of the railwaymen's Unions, all the members
having equal and identical functions and rights.
We do not yet know what agreement will be reached
about " standardisation " or the future scale of wages, but
the Ministry of Transport is not likely to try another fall
with the railwaymen's Trade Unions. The strike has had,
indeed, results of the first importance. The Government
has learnt that Trade Unionism is not easily beaten, even
when all the resources of the State are put forth against it,
T
I
546 Thirty Years' Growth
and when public opinion is incensed. The great capitahst
organisations have seen the warning against their projects
of a general reduction of wages ; and this is postponed, at
least, for a year. On the other hand, the railwaymen's
Unions have reaUsed the magnitude of the struggle into
which they so precipitately entered, or into which they were
so artfully inveigled. The need for, and the potency of,
skilled publicity work, and the possibiHties of a highly
organised and adequately supported Labour Research
Department, are commonly recognised. Finally, it is seen
that national industrial conflicts of such a magnitude are
matters of wider concern to the Trade Union world than
any one Union can appreciate ; and an attempt was made,
to be subsequently described, if not to continue in existence
the group of " Fourteen Mediators," at least to get estab-
lished some authoritative standing Council, by which the
approach of an impending industrial crisis of national scope
could be closely watched, so that all the necessary steps
may be taken in time to deal with the situation in the best
possible way. The Trade Union world reahsed its need
for what was called a General Staff.
Amalgamations and Federations
Whilst the numerical strength and industrial and political
influence of the several Trade Unions have thus steadily
increased during the past thirty years, it is less easy to
characterise the changes in the relations of Trade Unions
with each other.
The multiplicity of separate organisations in which the
six or seven million Trade Unionists are grouped, and the
comphcation and diversity of the relations among the various
societies, continue to-day, as they did thirty years ago, to
bafile classification, and almost to defy analysis. It remains
as impossible as it was in 1890 to state precisely how many
distinct Trade Unions are in existence, because the endless
variety of their federal organisations makes it uncertain which
Consolidation 547
of the local or sectional Unions are to be counted as inde-
pendent societies. We estimate, however, that upon any
computation the number of financially distinct organisa-
tions, which we may put at about iioo, remains approxi-
mately what it was thirty years ago. The tendency to
amalgamation, that is to say, has just about kept pace,
arithmetically, with the starting of new organisations, whilst
the average membership of each unit has more than quad-
rupled.
Such a statement fails, however, to do justice to the
change that has come over the Trade Union world. Thirty
years ago it was, x)n the whole, a congeries of numerically
small units, only two or three of which counted as many as
50,000 members. To-day there are nearly a dozen which
severally manage memberships of a quarter of a million,
and probably fifty which deal with more than 50,000 each.
A few other national societies of smaller membership are
of some importance. Scattered up and down the United
Kingdom a thousand other local or sectional societies exist,
with memberships from a few dozen to a few thousand, but
these play no part and exercise no influence in the movement
as a whole. Probably five-sixths of all the Trade Union
membership, and practically all its effective force, are to be
found among the hundred principal societies to which the
Ministry of Labour has long confined its detailed statistics.^
The movement for the amalgamation of competing
societies has, during the past decade, been specially energetic
and persistent. This has arisen, partly spontaneously,
from the obvious disadvantages attendant both on rivalry
^ British Trade Unionism has often been contrasted, to its disadvan-
tage, with the more scientifically classified German Trade Unionism before
the Great War. It was, for instance, often pointed out that the three
miUions of German Trade Unionists were grouped in no more than 48
Unions. This, however, ignored the numerous competing Hirsch-Duncker
and Christian Unions, which were far more destructive of unity than are
the crowd of minor societies in Great Britain and Ireland. At present
(1920) the 48 largest Trade Unions of this country' concentrate a larger
membership than the much-praised 48 Trade Unions of Germany did in
1914.
548 Thirty Years' Growth
between Trade Unions seeking to enrol the same classes of
members throughout the kingdom — such as that between
the various societies of raihvay employees — and on the
division of workmen of the same craft among a number of
independent local societies, such as the Coopers, the Chippers
and Drillers, and the Painters and other branches of the
Building Trades. But during the past decade the move-
ment has been reinforced by the desire for an organisation
based on the whole of an industry, such as engineering,
housebuilding, mining, or the railway service, in which all
the co-operating crafts and grades of workers would be
associated in a single Industrial Union ; in contrast with
the earlier conception of the separate organisation of each
craft throughout the whole kingdom ; such as that of the
carpenters, the enginemen, the engineering mechanics, the
clerks, and by analogy the general labourers, in whatsoever
industry they may be working. The case for the Industrial
Union in such an industry as mining, for example, merely
from the standpoint of Collective Bargaining, and for the
sake of getting effective Common Rules, has always been a
strong one ; but the movement for the substitution of
" Industrial " for " Craft " Unionism has been strengthened
since about 19 11 by the aspirations of those who saw in
Trade Unionism something more than an organisation for
raising wages and shortening the working day. If the
wage-earners were ever to obtain, through their own volun-
tary associations, the control of their own working lives,
and to obtain a steadily increasing participation in the
direction of industry ; if a Vocational Democracy were to
be superimposed on a Democracy based on geographical
constituencies ; it seemed as if this could be done only by
Trade Unions co-extensive with each separate industry.
The influence of the movement known as " Guild Socialism "
has accordingly been exercised, on the whole, in favour of
Industrial Unionism, not so much for the sake of its im-
mediate advantages in improving the conditions of the
wage-contract, as because it was only in this form that
The Industrial Union 549
Trade Unionism could become the vehicle of aspirations
to the control of each industry by the whole mass of the
workers employed therein.
Except in the way of industrial federations, to be here-
after referred to, it is only in mining and the railway service
that any great progress has been made in this direction.
The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, estabUshed, as
we have seen, only in 1888, with no more than 36,000
members, has attracted to itself, year by year, an almost
continuous stream of local or sectional organisations among
the 1,200,000 workers in and about the coal and iron-stone
mines ; successively absorbing into one or other of its local
units or affiliating directly to itself, not only all the district
associations, old or new, of coal-hewers and other under-
ground workers, but also some of the separate organisations
of enginemen and firemen, mine mechanics, deputies and
overmen, colliery clerks, cokemen, and others employed in or
about the mines, until its aggregate membership in 1920 is
somewhere about 900,000. And though the Miners' Federa-
tion is still only a Federation of fully autonomous district
associations — some of these, too, being themselves federa-
tions of the organisations of lesser localities ; and although
it still depends for its funds almost entirely upon specific
le\des upon its constituents, it has found means, by its
frequently meeting delegate conferences, controlling the
strong Executive Committee which they elect, to centralise
very effectively the general policy of the whole mining
industry, notably with regard to the hours of labour, the
conditions of safety, the percentage of general advances of
wages and the amount of the national war bonuses, and
last, though not least, on the burning issue of nationalisation
of the mines and the participation of the miners in their
administration. But although the Miners' Federation em-
bodies in its constitution the principles of federalism and
an extreme local autonomy, it takes no account of sectional
differences, and makes ho provision for the representation
at its delegate conferences, or upon its Executive Committee,
550 Thirty Years' Growth
of any distinct grades or sections. Perhaps, for this reason,
the Federation does not yet speak directly for all the
organised manual working wage-earners in the industry.
There are at least forty separate Trade Unions of engine-
men, boileiTnen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen,
under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials,
colliery clerks, and surface-workers of various kinds, not
yet affiliated to the Miners' Federation, either locally or
nationally ; these have formed National Federations,
parallel with the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, of
enginemen, deputies, colliery mechanics and under-managers
respectively ; and in February 191 7 seventeen of the
societies drew together to form the National Council of
Colliery Workers other than Miners, for the purpose of
maintaining their separate influence.
In the railway service, as we have already described, the
merging in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants,
first of the Scottish Society in 1892, and then of the General
Railway Workers' Union, and the United Signalmen and
Pointsmen's Society in 1913, made possible the estabhshment
of the National Union of Railwaymen on the basis of an
organisation co-extensive with the industry, with the
embodiment in the constitution of sectional representation.
The four " departments " into which the members are
divided vote separately in the elections. Under these
provisions the National Union of Railwaymen, though
hampered by the continuance of the separate Associated
Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, has been
able to make effective not only its claims for higher re-
muneration, but also its (Remands for a normal Eight Hours
Day, a national system of classification, and national wage
scales for the several grades ; though still not its aspirations
(expressed since 1914) to participation in management, or
those (expressed for over a decade) to the elimination from
industry of the capitalist profitmaker by the scheme of
Railway Nationalisation.
In other industries, too, the concentration of Trade
Amalgamation 551
Union forces during the past decade has increasingly taken
the form of an amalgamation of rival sectional organisations,
sometimes in response to a demand from the rank and file.
Thus the Ship Constructors' and Shipwrights' Association,
estabhshed in 1888, has successfully absorbed not only the
very old Shipwrights' Provident Union of London, but also
all the remaining local Trade Unions of shipwrights that long
lingered in Liverpool, DubHn, etc. The National Amalga-
mated Furnishing Trades Association has taken over a
number of small societies of French polishers, gilders, and
upholsterers. The United Garment Workers' Trade Union
was formed in 1915 by the amalgamation of a number of
societies in the various sections of the tailoring trade ; and
in 19 19 it was agreed that this, together with the Scottish
Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, should be merged in the
old Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, which
would then include practically all the organised workers in
the making of men's and women's clothing in Great Britain.
Many small Unions of machine workers, minor craftsmen,
and general labourers have been absorbed in one or other
of the half-a-dozen large Labour Unions. The Amalgamated
Card and Blowing-Room Operatives have taken over various
small sectional societies in the Cotton trade. In Sheffield
thirteen small Unions, catering for different sections of the
gold and silver workers, joined together in 1910 in the Gold,
Silver, and Kindred Trades Society, which in 1913 absorbed
several more societies in this industry. In the autumn of
1919, as we have already mentioned, six of the sectional
societies in the engineering industry decided to merge
themselves, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
in a new and more gigantic amalgamation with 400,000
members ; the United Pattern Makers' Society, the Elec-
trical Trades Union, and many smaU and speciaUsed societies
of mechanics in iron still standing aloof. In the same
month three of the principal Unions of postal and telegraph
employees united in a single Union of Post Office Workers,
with 90,000 members. Other amalgamations among small
552 Thirty Years' Growth
or local societies took place among the Basket-makers, the
Block Printers, the Leather-workets, the Dyers, the various
sections in the Pottery Trade, etc.
Such amalgamation is greatly obstructed by legal
requirements. Down to 1917 the law demanded that each
society desiring to unite should ratify the decision by a
two-thirds majority not merely of those voting, but of the
entire membership. Such a poll is almost impossible of
attainment by Trade Unions, whose members cannot usually
be individuall}^ communicated with, owing not only to their
frequent changes of residence and the absence of many of
them abroad, but also to the lack, in most cases, of any
complete register of addresses. In 1917 the Government
at last permitted the passage of an Amending Act for which
Trade Unionists had often pressed ; but even then insisted
on any amalgamation being carried, at a 50 per cent poll
of the whole membership, by at least 20 per cent majority,
conditions which make amalgamation everywhere difficult,
and in some Unions (such as those of seamen) quite im-
possible. In several cases Unions in which the general
opinion has been in favour of amalgamation have failed to
get the necessary vote. We have already described the
ingenious device by which the British Steel Smelters'
Society and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation sur-
mounted this difficulty.
Meanwhile, of federations as distinct from amalgamations
the Trade Union world has a variety more bewildering than
ever, some of which have already been referred to. We have
to note that the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades
Federation, the establishment of which in i88g we described
in Industrial Democracy, has continued in existence, doing
useful work from time to time in connection with demarca-
tion disputes and other subjects of inter-union controversy,
especially on the North-East Coast, notably contributing
also in 1905 to the successful claim of the Clyde trades to
weekly instead of fortnightly pays, which the employers
had stubbornly resisted for a whole decade, but continuing
Federation 553
to be weakened by the abstention, except for a few years,
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which, however,
now frequently consents to act in conjunction with it in
general trade questions.
What is significant is the change in type and purpose of
these multifarious industrial federations, which have now
come to form an important element in the Trade Union
world. ^ Federation, in fact, has undergone a subtle change
of character. Instead of loose alliances for mutual support
in disputes, or for the adjustment of mutual differences as
to " demarcation " and transfer of members, the federations
of all the craft or sectional Unions engaged in particular
industries — notably those of the Building Trades, the
Transport Workers, and, though not yet to the same extent,
the Printing Trades and the Woollen Workers, like the
older organisation of the Cotton Operatives — ^have become
increasingly, themselves negotiating bodies, recognised by
the equally organised employers, and concerting with these
what are, in effect, national regulations governing their
industries throughout the whole kingdom. The later
development of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades
Federation has been in the same direction. In the case of
the Miners' Federation of Great Britain the development
has gone still further ; and this great organisation, whilst
retaining the federal form, and, even now, not completely
admitted to " recognition " by the Mining Association of
Great Britain, unquestioningly acts for the whole industry
in national issues, as if it were an " amalgamated " Union.
Whether or not we are to see all the rival and sectional
Unions in each industry amalgamating into a single " In-
dustrial Union," as many Trade Unionists desire, it must be
recognised that the development, during the past decade,
of active negotiating federations for the several industries
goes far to supply the most urgent need. In short, although
financially distinct Trade Unions remain, on the whole, as
numerous as ever, the number of separate negotiating
^ See An Introduction to Trade Unionism, by G. D. H. Cole, 1917.-
T2
554 Thirty Years' Growth
bodies, so far as concerns matters relating to an industry as
a whole, becomes steadily smaller.
We pass now to federal bodies of a different character.
The General Federation of Trade Unions
In 1899, arising out of the losses caused by the costly
engineering dispute of 1897-98, the Trades Union Congress
established a General Federation of Trade Unions, largely
at the instance of Robert Knight, the able secretary of the
Boilermakers, designed exclusively as a mutual reinsurance
agency against the heavy financial burden to which, in the
form of Strike Pay, or Dispute or Contingent Benefit, labour
disputes subject every active trade society.^ By means
of a small contribution from a large aggregate membership
(is. or 2s. per year per member), the General Federation is
able to recoup to its constituent societies 2s. 6d. or 5s. per
week per member affected towards their several expenditures
upon disputes. Beginning with 44 societies, having a total
membership of 343,000, it steadily increased the number of
its adherents until, in 1913, it had affiliated as many as 150
societies, having at that date 884,291 members. Since that
time the number of societies has dropped to 141 in 19 19 ; but
their increase in membership had raised the aggregate
affiliation to 1,215,107, the largest ever recorded. The
General Federation, whilst suffering for the past seven years
from an arrest of growth, has to its credit twenty years'
success in surmounting the difficulties which have destroyed
every previous attempt of the kind, and its prudent manage-
ment is shown by the fact that it was able, from its normal
revenue, to discharge all its obligations down to 1905, and to
accumulate a reserve of £119,656. In that year the members
rashly insisted on a reduction of the contributipn by one-
third, not foreseeing the outburst of disputes in 1908-9,
^ See the History of the British Trades Union Congress (by W. J. Davis),
vol. ii. (1916), p. 156; and the successive ^«««a/ Reports oi the General
Federation of Trade Unions from 1900 onward.
The General Federation 555
which caused the Federation to pay out for 638 disputes
no less than £122,778, and necessitated in 1913 the doubhng
of the contribution. Since that date, in spite of payments to
societies averaging £1500 every week of the year, the Federa-
tion has not only met its engagements, but also built up a
reserve exceeding a quarter of a million sterling. In 191 1
it formed an Approved Society under the National Insurance
Act, with the object of relieving the separate Trade Unions,
and notably the thousand smaU ones, from the onerous task
of separately administering the Act, and to ensure that
their members did not go off to the Industrial Insurance
Companies, an effort wliich has failed to attract more than
a few thousand members. An extension of the effort to
the provision of death benefits, by the formation of a Friendly
Society section in 1913, has proved scarcely more successful.
It must be recognised that during the past six or seven
years the Federation has lost favour with important sections
of the Trade Union world. It was probably inevitable that,
its inclusion of small sectional societies should eventually
bring it into conflict with the larger Unions by whom such
societies are often regarded as illegitimate competitors.
Grounds of this kind may be assigned for the secession of
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated
Society of Tailors in 1915 ; and for the powerful hostihty
shown since 19 13 by the Miners' Federation of Great
Britain. But this feeling has been accentuated by a growing
resentment of the part played by the General Federation —
not unconnected with the forceful personahty of the General
Secretary — first in international relations, and secondly in
the representation of Trade Union opinion to the Government
and to the public.
The General Federation, from its very establishment,
affiliated itself to the International Trade Union Federation,
which aimed at the collection and publication of statistics
of Trade Unionism all over the world by an International
Trade Union Secretariat, and at the mutual interchange of
Trade Union information. For the first fifteen years of its
556 Thirty Years* Growth
existence this action of the General Federation was not
objected to, although the fact that it represented only 25 to
30 per cent of British Trade Unionism impaired the value of
its statistical contributions. The Parliamentary Committee
of the Trades Union Congress, which might well have under-
taken the task, long ignored its international interests ;
but during the Great War increasingly resented the appear-
ance of the General Federation as the representative of
British Trade Unionism, and especially the almost continuous
negotiations between its secretary, Mr. Appleton, and Mr.
Gompers, the Secretary of the American Federation of
Labor, and with M. Jouhaux, the Secretar};' of the Confedera-
tion Generale du Travail of France, along lines not consistent
with those of the Labour Party and the Trades Union
Congress. When, in 1918, attempts were made to reconstitute
the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Parlia-
mentary Committee claimed at first to be itself the repre-
sentative of Great Britain ; but presently compromised on a
joint and equal representation by the two bodies.
But more serious than the question of international
representation was the resentment at the ever-widening
range of subjects at home on which Mr. Appleton, the
Management Committee, and the Conferences of the General
Federation claimed to voice the feelings of Organised Labour.
It was urged that the Federation was formed exclusively
for the purpose of mutually reinsuring Strike Benefit, and
that it had accordingly no mandate, and did nothing but
weaken the Trade Union forces, both in the narrow field
of the conditions of the wage contract, and on the broader
issues of Labour's political aspirations, whenever it entered
into rivalry with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades
Union Congress on the one hand, or with the Labour Party
on the dther. It looks as if the General Federation must
in future either restrict itself to the hmitcd range of its
original purpose, or else run the risk of being financially
weakened by the secession of influential Trade Unions,
which will not permanently remain afiiliated to all three
Trades Councils 557
national bodies, when finding these speaking on the same
subjects with different voices.
Trades Councils
Of another form of loose federation of the branches of
all the Trade Unions within a given area we have already
described the origin and the development in the local Trades
Councils. These have gone on increasing in number, much
more than in strength, until in 1920 we estimate that
more than 500 are in existence, with an aggregate affiliated
membership running into several milHons of Trade Unionists.
The character of their active membership, their functions,
and their proceedings have remained much as we described
them thirty years ago ; but they have, on the whole, in-
creased in strength and local influence, as well as in numbers
and membership. They were, as we shall presently mention,
somewhat arbitrarily excluded in 1895 from the Trades
Union Congress, of which they were actually the originators ;
and although they have since joined in various provincial
federations of Trades Councils,^ these have never acquired
any great strength, and do Uttle more than arrange for
co-operation in local demonstrations. An attempt to form
a National Federation of Trades Councils did not succeed.
On the other hand, as we shall describe in Chapter XL,
the Trades Councils were, from its- establishment in 1900,
admitted, equally with Trade Unions, as constituents of the
Labour Representation Committee (now the Labour Party),
and whether as Trades Councils, or (notably with the smaller
ones) in their new form of " Trades Councils and Local
Labour Parties," they are coming slowly to form its geo-
graphical basis. It is more and more on the political side
that they are in some degree succeeding in uniting the
energies of the Trade Unions of a particular town. This is
especially the case so far as municipal politics are concerned.
^ Such as those for Kent, Lancashire and Cheshire, North Wales, the
South- Western Counties, and Yorkshire.
558 Thirty Years' Growth
They have, for instance, been the main force in securing
the general adoption of the Fair Wages Clause, and in
furthering the election of Labour Candidates to local govern-
ing bodies. But they are rigidly excluded from all partici-
pation in the government or trade policy of the Unions ; and,
so far "as Trade Unionism itself is concerned, their direct
influence on questions of national scope is not great.
Consisting, as in the main they do, of the delegates elected
by branches of national societies, they are hampered by the
narrow limits of the branch autonomy. For in trade matters
the branch can bring to the Council no power which it does
not itself possess, whilst towards any action involving expense
by the Council it can, in many Unions, contribute only the
voluntary extra-subscriptions of its members. During the
present century, however, many Unions have started
paying from central funds the afhliation fees of their branches
to Trades Councils. Down to the end of the Nineteenth
Century, however, the resources of the Councils accordingly
seldom sufficed for more than the hire of a room to meet in,^
the necessary postage and stationery, and the payment of a
few pounds a year for the " loss of time " of their principal
officers. In no case except London does a Trades Council
as such, even in 1920, pay a " full-time " salary, so as to
command the whole time of a single salaried official, though
the Trades Councils of cities Uke Glasgow, Manchester, and
Bradford have salaried secretaries who have other duties ;
and where the Trades Council is combined with tlie" Local
Labour Party it is more and more coming to have the
services of a Registration Officer or Election Agent, whose
salary is usually provided as part of the election expenses
of the Labour candidate.
For a long time it could hardly be said that the Trades
Councils enjoyed even the moral support of the great
1 At Nottingham, Leicester, Brighton, Hanley, Manchester, Worcester,
and some other towns, the Trades Council has at times been allowed the
use of a room in the Town Hall, or other municipal building. The Local
Ciovernment Board in 1908 suggested to Local Authorities that this
assistance should be generally afiorded to them.
Supporters of Trades Councils 559
Unions. The central executives of the national societies
were apt to view with suspicion and jealousy the existence
of governing bodies in which they were not directly repre-
sented. The local branches, if not actually forbidden, were
not encouraged to adhere to what might conceivably become
a rival authority. The strong county Unions frequently
stood aloof unless they were allowed an overwhelming
representation. One of the notable changes of the present
century has been the diminution of this jealous}^ of the
Trades Councils. We know of no case in which branches
are now forbidden to join a Trades Council. In most cases,
although permission may have to be obtained from the
Executive Council or Committee, it is nowadays readily
granted, and with the recognition of the need for political
action, between 1901 and 1913, came positive encourage-
ment to the branches to afhhate to the Trades Councils of
their locahties.^
It rerilains, however, true in 1920 as in 1890 that the
Trades Councils do not include the national leaders of the
Trade Union world. The salaried officials of the old-
estabhshed societies seldom take part in their proceedings.
The London Trades Council, for instance, the classic meeting-
place of the Junta, has long since ceased to be able to count
among its delegates the General Secretaries of the Engineers,.
Bricklayers, Railwaymen, Steel-smelters, or of any other
of the great Societies having their head offices in London.
The powerful coterie "of cotton officials forms no part of the
Manchester Trades Council. Of the boilermakers, neither
the General Secretary nor any one of the nine District
^ One of the most active supporters of the Trades Council Movement
is the National Union of Railwaymen, which has been largely responsible
for the valuable help rendered by the Trades Councils in the organisation
of agricultural labourers. The Amalgamated Union of Co-operative
Employees, that of Operative Bakers of Great Britain and Ireland, and
the Municipal Employees' Association are also outstanding supporters of
the Trades Councils, whilst the Oldham Operative Cotton-spinners, and
the Operative Lace Makers of Nottingham make branch affiUation com-
pulsory. In many of the principal Unions branch affiliation fees are
contributed wholly, or in large proportion, from Central Funds.
560 Thirty Years' Growth
Delegates is usually to be found on a Trades Council. The
Miners' Agents are notorious for abstention from the Councils
in their localities. This, however, is due nowadays, what-
ever may once have been the reason, principally to the
enormous additions to the work of all the salaried officials
of the Trade Union world, which make it impossible for the
majority of them to attend Trades Council meetings. The
Trades Councils now serve as a useful training-ground, wider
than that of the Trade Union Branch, for those whom we
have elsewhere described as the non-commissioned officers
of the Movement, from whose ranks nearly all the Trade
Union leaders emerge.
Apart from their constant activity in municipal poUtics,
and their energetic support of the Labour Party in all
elections, the Trades Councils have, in the present century,
considerably increased in usefulness. They have given
valuable assistance in Trade Union propaganda, alike
within their own districts and in the adjacent rural districts.
No small part of the increase in Trade Union membership,
notably among nondescript workers in the towns, and the
agricultural labourers in the country, is to be ascribed to
the constant work and support of some of the more active
among them. They have done much to appease quarrels
among the local branches of different Unions, and they are
occasionally able to intervene successfully as arbitrators.^
Even without formal arbitration they bring waning parties
together. They nominate working-class representatives to
many local committees and conferences, and serve, in this
way, as useful links with public administration. Some of
them have, of recent j^ears, done a great deal to promote
the better education of the artisan class. They affiliate to
the Workers' Educational Association or the Labour College,
and support its classes ; they arrange public meetings and
^ The Manchester Trades Council, and especially its Chairman, Mr.
Purcell, of the Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association, successfully
brought to a comproVnise the very serious strike of the Amalgamated
Union of Co-operative Employees against the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Co-operative Societies in 1919.
Trades Union Congress 561
obtain outside speakers ; they affiliate to the Labour
Research Department, which has a special " Trades Councils
and Local Labour Parties Section " ; they subscribe to the
travelling library of book-boxes maintained by the Fabian
Society ; they frequently issue their own monthly bulletin
of Trade Union and Labour news, or journal of local govern-
ment information, or at least their annual Y ear-Book ; and
they act as distributing centres for the nationally pubUshed
pamphlets and leaflets — sometimes even for the more
popular books on Labour questions.^ They have come, in
several centres, to form, by Joint Councils, an indispensable
connecting link between the Trade Union and Co-operative
Movements, and they serve, more than any other agency,
as the cement between the local branches of these two
movements and the Labour Party itself. To what extent
they are destined, in their character of constituent members
of the Labour Party, sometimes actually combined with
Local Labour Parties (in the latter cases with the inclusion,
since 1918, of a section of individual members. Trade
Unionists or others, " workers by hand or by brain "), to
develop an effective poUtical organisation, drawing together
the whole of the supporters of the Labour Party in each
Parhamentary constituency, remains yet to be demonstrated.
The Trades Union Congress
But the most extensive federation of the Trade Union
world is to-day, as it has always been, the Trades Union
Congress, which could count in September 1919 an affiliated
membership of more than five and a quarter millions, a
number never paralleled in this or any other country. We
have described in previous chapters the origin and develop-
ment of this federal body, its uses in drawing together the
scattered Trade Union forces, and its failure either to help
^ The Gateshead Trades Council and Local Labour Party holds an
" Information Bureau meeung " once a week, devoted to answering
inquiries and affording information on Local Government affairs.
562 Thirty Years' Growth
in the solution of the problems of industrial organisation or
to give an intellectual lead to the rank and file.^
We drew attention in the first edition of this book in
1894 to the weakness of the organisation of this imposing
annual Congress ; and, from 1895 onward, certain changes
have been successively made in its constitution and pro-
cedure, not always, as we think, for the better. At the
Norwich Congress in 1894 the Parhamentary Committee,
which the Congress annually elects as its executive, was
charged by a resolution proposed by W. J. Davis to consider
the amendment of the Standing Orders, and to make the
amended orders applicable to the next Congress. On the
authority of this ambiguous resolution, which seems to have
had in view only the establishment of Grand Committees to
deal with the' multiplicity of resolutions on the annual
agenda, the Parliamentary Committee, of which the Chair-
man was then John Burns, M.P., decided forthwith to expel
all the Trades Councils from the Congress, to make obligatory
the " vote by card " according, not to the number of dele-
gates, but to the aggregate membership of each Union, and
to confine the delegates rigidly to the contemporary salaried
officers and the members of Trade Unions actually working
at their crafts — thereby excluding not only the veteran
Henry Broadhurst, M.P., with John Burns himself, but also
Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, and other leaders of the new move-
ment that was seeking to make Trade Unionism a political
force. Who, exactly, was responsible for this coup- d'etat
was not officially revealed. It was said, with some authority,
that James Mawdsley, the rough and forceful secretary of
the Cotton-spinners, was at the bottom of the move, and
that he made use of the personal rivalry between Henry
Broadhurst and John Burns to get them both, and also the
^ The Trades Union Congress has, since 1873, published a long and
detailed Animal Report ; and the Parliamentary Committee has, for some
years past, issued a Quarterly Ciradar to its constituent bodies. Besides
these, there should be consulted the History of the British Trades Union
Congress, by W. J. Davis, of which two volumes have been issued (1910 and
191 6) ; Henry Broadhurst, the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901.
Stagnation in Congress 563
rebellious element from the Trades Councils, which all three
disUked, excluded from future Congresses.^ The Congress
at Cardiff in 1S95 was very angry, and, in effect, rebuked
the Parliamentary Committee, but allpwed the new Standing
Orders to be confirmed on the newly adopted " card vote."
In so far as the intention was to keep the new ideas out of
Congress, the result was plainly a failure, as within four
years (to be described in Chapter XI.) there was a majority
in Congress for the creation of the independent organisation
entitled the Labour Representation Committee, which
became in due course the present Labour Party. The effect
was merely to weaken the intellectual influence on the
Trade Union world of the Congress and its Parliamentary
Committee.
With this exception of the exclusion of the Trades
Councils, and of the outstanding personaUties whom they
occasionally sent , as delegates, the \asitor to the Trades
Union Congress in 19 19 would have found very little differ-
ence between it and the Congresses of thirty years before,
except for an increase in the size of the gathering and in
the number of members represented ; and, as must be added,
an all-round improvement in the education and manners,
especially of the younger delegates. As an institution it
can hardly be said to have shown, between 1890 and 1917
at least, any development at all.
It must be admitted that, with aU its shortcomings, the
Congress, which has now for over fifty years continued to
meet annually in some industrial centre, serves many useful
purposes. It is, to begin with, an outward and \dsible sign
of that persistent sentiment of solidarity which has through-
out the whole of the past century distinguished the working
class. Composed of delegates from all the great national
and county Unions and an increasing number of local
societies, and largely attended by the salaried officials, the
Congress, unlike the Trades Councils, is reaUy representative
^ See the significant comments in History of the British Trades Union
Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. ii., 1916, pp. 102-8.
'564 Thirty Years' Growth
(except for the absence of most of the political side of its
organisation) of all the elements of the Trade Union world.
Hence its discussions reveal, both to the Trade Union Civil
Service and to party politicians, the movement of opinion
among all sections of Trade Unionists, and, through them,
of the great body of the wage-earners. Moreover, the week's
meeting gives a unique opportunity for friendly intercourse
between the representatives of the different trades, and
thus leads frequently to joint action or wider federations.
Nevertheless the Congress remains, as we have diescribed it
in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces
than a genuine Parliament of Labour.^
All the incidental circumstances tend to accentuate the
parade features of Congress at the expense of its legislative
capacity. The Mayor and Corporation of the city in which
it is held are frequently permitted to give a public welcome
to the delegates, and to hold a sumptuous reception in their
honour. The Strangers' Gallery is full of interested observers ,
Distinguished foreigners, representatives of Government
departments, " fraternal delegates " from America and the
Continent, and from the Co-operative Union and the National
Union of Teachers, inquisitive poHticians, and popularity-
^ In the early period of its history the middle-class friends of Trade
Unionism read papers and took part in debates. But for many years no
one has been allowed to participate in its proceedings in any capacity
except duly elected delegates who have worked at the trade they repre-
sent, or are actually salaried officials of affiliated Trade Unions. In 1892
and 1893 admission was further limited to those societies which contri-
buted a specified amount per thousand members to the funds of the
Congress. The Parliamentary Committee consists of seventeen members,
elected by ballot of the whole of the delegates on the fifth day of the Con-
gress. The successful candidates are usually the salaried officers of the
great societies, the Standing Orders expressly providing that no trade shall
have more than one representative except the miners, who may now have
two. The Secretary receives, even in 1920, only ;^500 a year, and the
post has nearly always been fill6d by an officer enjoying emoluments for
other duties. For the last forty years the holder has almost constantly
been a member of Parliament, with prior obligations to his constituents,
which are not always consistent with the directions of his fellow Trade
Unionists ; and with onerous Parliamentary duties, which often hamper
his secretarial work. For many years lie had to provide whatever clerical
assistance he required ; but in 1S9G a clerk, and in 1917 an Assistant
Secretary, were added to the staff.
Congress Business 565
hunting ministers sit through every day's proceedings.
The press-table is crowded with reporters from all the
principal newspapers of the kingdom, whilst the local
organs vie with each other in bringing out special editions
containing verbatim reports of each day's discussions. But
what more than anything else makes the Congress a holiday
demonstration instead of a responsible deliberative assembly
is its total lack of legislative power. The delegates are well
aware that Congress resolutions on " subjects " have no
binding effect on their constituents, and therefore do not
take the trouble to put them in practicable form, or even
to make them consistent one with another. From the
outset the proceedings are unbusiness-like. Much of the
first day is consumed in pure routine and a lengthy inaugural
address from the President, who has been since 1900 always
the Chairman of the Parhamentary Committee of the
preceding year. The rest of the agenda consists of resolu-
tions sent in by the various Unions and brought higgledy-
piggledy before the Congress in an order determined by
the chances of the ballot. These resolutions are subjected
to no selection or revision beyond an attempt by sub-
committees to merge in one the several proposals on each
subject. The delegates have at their disposal about twenty-
five hours to discuss every imaginable subject, ranging
from the nationalisation of the means of production down
to the prohibition of one carter driving two vehicles at a
time. To enable even a minority of those present to
speak for or against the proposals, each speaker is limited
to five, or perhaps to three minutes, a rule which is more
or less rigidly enforced. But, in spite of this vigorous
apphcation of the closure, the President is seldom able to
get the business through, and has frequently as much as
he can do to maintain order. The Standing Orders Com-
mittee is entirely taken up with its mechanical business,
and is not authorised, any more than is the Parliamentary
Comrflittee itself, to formulate a programme for the con-
sideration of the delegates. Nor does the Congress receive
566 Thirty Years' Growth
much guidance from experienced officials of the old-estab-
lished Unions. Whether from a good-natured desire to
let the private members have their turn at figuring in the
newspapers, or from a somewhat cynical appreciation of
the fruitlessness of Congress discussions, many of them
habitually lie low, and seldom speak except to defend
themselves against attacks. Moreover, they are busily
engaged, both in and out of Congress hours, in arranging
for the election of themselves or their friends on the Parlia-
mentary Committee, which has hitherto always been
governed by mutual " bargaining " for votes. ^ When
the four days' talk draws near to an end, many of the
resolutions on the agenda are still undisposed of. On the
Saturday morning, when most of the delegates have started
for home, a thin meeting hurries rapidly through the re-
mainder of the proposals, speeches are reduced to sixty
seconds each, and the Congress adopts a score of important
resolutions in a couple of hours. From first to last there
is no sign of a " Front Bench " of responsible leaders. As a
business meeting the whole function of the Congress is
discharged in the election of the Parliamentary Committee,
to which the representation of the Trade Union world for
the ensuing year is entrusted.
In the first edition of this book, in 1894, we gave a
description of the work of the Parliamentary Committee
which it is interesting to recall :
The duties of the Parliamentary Committee have never been
expressly defined by Congress, and it will easily be understood
that resolutions of the kind we have described afford but little
guidance for practical work. But there is a general understand-
ing that the Committee is to watch over the political interests
1 Each Union casts votes in proportion to its affiliated membership,
but can divide them as it pleases among the candidates. Between 1906
and 191 5 the delegates were divided into ten groups of allied industries,
and each group chose its own member. At the 1919 Congress a resolution
was carried directing that the election should henceforth be by the trans-
fera.ble vote ; and it remains to be seen whether this will upset the
"dickering for votes."
The Parliamentary Committee 567
of its constituents, in much the same way as the ParUamentary
Committee of a town council or a raihvay company. It is
obvious that, in the case of the Trade Union world, such a
mandate covers a wide field. The right of Free Association,
won by Allan, Applegarth, Odger, and their alhes, is now a past
issue, but the Trade Union interest in legislation has, with the
advance of Democracy, extended to larger and more conipHcated
problems. The complete democratisation of the poHtical machin-
evy, the duty of the Government to be a model employer, the
further regulation of private enterprise through perfected factory
legislation, the pubhc adminis'tration of monopoUes, are all
questions in which the Trade Union world of to-day considers
itself keenly interested. To these distinctly labour issues must
be added such interests of the non-propertied class as the in-
cidence of taxation, the pubUc provision for education and
recreation, and the maintenance of the sick and the aged. We
have here an amount of ParUamentary business far in excess of
that faUing upon the ParUamentary Committee of any ordinary
town council or railway company. To examine aU biUs, pubUc
or private, introduced into ParUament that may possibly affect
any of the foregoing Trade Union interests ; to keep a constant
watch on the administration of the public departments ; to
scrutinise the Budget, the Education Code, and the Orders of
the Local Government Board ; to bring pressure to bear on the
Ministry of the day, so as to mould the Queen's Speech into a
Labour Programme ; to promote independent BiUs on all the
subjects upon which the Government refuses to legislate ; and„
lastly, to organise that persistent " lobbying " of Ministers and
private members which finally cUnches a popular demand — aU
this constitutes a task which would tax the energies of half a
dozen higlily trained ParUamentary agents devoting their whole
time to their cUents. This is the work which the Trade Union
Congress delegates to a committee of busy officials, aU absorbed
in the multifarious details of their own societies, and served
only by a Secretary who is paid for a smaU part of his time,
and who accordingly combines the office with other duties. ^
^ The situation was for years further compHcated by the fact
that C. Fenwick, M.P., who in 1890 succeeded Henry Broadhurst in the
office, was one of the Parhamentary representa^tives of the Durham miners,
a majority of whom were not in accordance with the decision of the Congress
or. the crucial question of an Eight Hours' Bill. It was in vain that
Fonwick, with most engaging candour, explained to each successive
568 Thirty Years' Growth
The whole organisation is so absurdly inadequate to the
task, that the Committee can hardly be blamed for giving up
any attempt to keep pace with the work. The members leave
their provincial headquarters fifteen or twenty times a year to
spend a few hours in the httle offices at 19 Buckingham Street,
Strand, in deliberating upon such business as their Secretary
brings before them. Preoccupied with the affairs of their socie-
ties, and unversed in general politics, they either confine their
attention to the interests of their own trades, or look upon the
fortnightly trip to London as a pleasant recreation from hard
official duties. In the intervals iDetween the meetings the Secre-
tary struggles with the business as best he can, with such clerical
help as he can afford to pay for out of his meagre allowance.
Absorbed in his own Parhamentary duties, for the performance
of which his constituents pay him a salary, he can devote to
the general interests of the Trade Union world only the leavings
of his time and attention. It is therefore not surprising to learn
that the agenda laid before the Parhamentary Committee, in-
stead of covering the extensive field indicated by the resolutions
of the Congress, is habitually reduced to the barest minimum.
The work annually accompUshed by the Committee during the
last few years has, in fact, been hmited to a few deputations to
the Government, two or three circulars to the Unions, a httle
consultation with friendly pohticians, and the drafting of an
elaborate report to Congress, describing, not their doings, but
the legislation and other Parliamentary proceedings of the
session. The result is that the executive committee of the
United Textile Factory Workers' Association and the Miners'
Federation exercised a far more potent influence in the lobby
than the Committee representing the whole Trade Union world ;
whilst such expert manipulators as Mr. John Bums, Mr. Havelock
Congress that his pledge to his constituents, no less than his own opinions,
would compel him actively to oppose all regulation of the hours of adult
male labour. The Congress nevertheless elected him for four successive
years as Secretary to the Parliamentary Committee, replacing him only
in 1894 by an officer who was prepared to support the policy of the
Congress. This is only another example of the extraordinary constancy
(referred to at p. 471) with which a working-class organisation adheres to
a man who has once been elected an officer — a constancy due, as we think,
partly to a generous objection to " do a man out of his job," and partly
to a deep-rooted belief that any given piece of work can be done as well
by one man as another. Much the same situation has recurred frequently
in the record of the Parhamentary Committee.
Lack of Staff 569
\\'ilson, or Mr. George Howell, can point to more reforms effected
in a single session than the Parliamentary Committee has lately
accompUshed during a whole Parhament.
It is therefore not surprising that there exists in the Trade
Union world a growing feehng of irritation against the Parlia-
mentary Committee. In each successive Congress the Committee,
instead of taking the lead, finds itself placed on its defence. But
it is obvious that Congress itself is to blame. The members of
the Committee, including the Secretary, are men of quite as
sterling character and capacity as a board of railwa.y directors
or a committee of to\vn councillors. But whereas a railway
company or a towTi council places at the disposal of its Parlia-
mentary Committee the whole energies of a specially trained
town clerk or soUcitor, and allows him, moreover, to call to his
aid as many expert advisers as he thinks fit, the Trades Union
Congress expects the Parliamentary affairs of a million and a
half members to be transacted by a staff inferior to that of a
third-rate Trade Union. At one period, it is true, the leaders
of the Trade Union world as a whole successfully conducted a
long and arduous Parhamentary campaign. We have described
in a previous chapter the momentous le;gislative revolution in
the status of Trade Unionism which was effected between 1867
and 1875. But the Conference of Amalgamated Trades, and its
successors the Parliamentary Committee, had in these years at
their command the freely given services of such a galaxy of
legal and Parliamentary talent as Mr. Frederic Harrison, Pro-
fessor, E. S. Beesly, Mr. Henry Crompton, Mr. Thomas (now
Judge) Hughes, Messrs. Godfrey and Vernon Lushington, and
Mr. (now Justice) R. S. Wright. The objection felt by the
present generation of Trade Unionists to be beholden to middle-
class friends is not without a certain vahdity. But if the Trade
Union Congress wants its Parhamentary business done it must,
at any rate, provide such a salarv- as will secure the full services
of the ablest man in the movement, equip his office with an
adequate number of clerks, and authorise the Parhamentary
Committee to retain such expert professional assistance as may
from time to tirne be required.
Such was the position as we saw it in 1894. The Trades
Union Congress did not in any important respect improve
its organisation, nor equip its Parliamentary Committee with
any adequate staff. Its failure to cope with the Parlia-
570 Thirty Years' Growth
mentary business in which the Trade Union world was
interested became more and more manifest ; and the
discontent was increased by the disincUnation felt by many
of the leading members of the Committee for the larger
aspirations and more independent attitude in politics that
marked the active spirits of the rank and file of Trade Union
membership. All this co-operated to produce the vote of
the 1899 Congress in favour of some definite step to increase
the number of Labour Members in the House of Commons,
out of which sprang the independent organisation subse-
quently known as the Labour Party, which we shall describe
in Chapter XL But although the Trades Union Congress
thus created, at the very end of the nineteenth century, a
separate political organisation for the Trade Union world,
into which the steadily increasing political activity of the
Trade Unions has since flowed, the Congress and its Parlia-
mentary Committee made no change in their own work.
There has accordingly continued to be the same stream,
year after year, of miscellaneous resolutions before Congress,
99 per cent of them dealing with political issues, involving
either legislation or a change of Government policy, resolu-
tions which have continued to be presented and discussed
without any regard to their place in any consistent programme
for the Trade Union world as a whole. The Parliamentary
Committee has continued to regard itsjglf almost entirely
as a Parliamentary Committee, just as if the Trade Unions
had not united in a distinct political organisation and had
not created their own Parliamentary Labour Party. The
futile annual deputations to Ministers have continued to
present to them the crude resolutions of the Trades Union
Congress, without regard to the contemporary situation in
the House of Commons, or the action taken by the Parlia-
mentary Labour Party, and without taking into account
in what relation they stand to the political programme of
the Trade Union world as formulated, year by year, in the
Conferences of the Labour Party, Meanwhile the essentially
industrial work of the national organisation of Trade Unions
Lack of Policy 571
has continued to be neglected. Both the Trades Union
Congress and the Parliamentary Committee have shown
the greatest disincHnation to tackle such essentially Trade
Union problems as those presented by the existence in the
same trade of competing Trade Unions ; ^ by the formation
of separate Unions on overlapping and mutualh^ inconsistent
bases ; by the growing rivalry between the warring con-
ceptions of organisation by craft and organisation by
industry ; by the increasing failure of the membership of
each branch to correspond with the staffs of the separate
gigantic estabUshments characteristic of the present day ; by
the " rank and file movement," demanding a greater 'direct
control of workshop conditions than can easily be made
compatible with the centralisation of poUcy in the national
executives ; by the development of the " Shop Stewards' "
organisation ; by the spread in different industries of
systems of " payment by results," unsafeguarded by the
necessary adaptations of the Standard Rate and Collective
Bargaining ; by the tendency of the employers to make
deductions from the Standard Rate when it suits them to
take on individuals or new classes of workers whom they
declare to be inferior, whether women or boys, old men
or partially incapacitated workers of any sort ; and by the
introduction of " Scientific Management." ^
^ One such case may be mentioned. In 1898 a small Trade Union of
old standing (Co-operative Smiths' Society, Gateshead) formally complained
that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers had allowed its members to
take the places of men who had struck. The ParUamentary Committee,
acting under Standing Order No. 20, appointed three of its members as
arbitrators, who, after elaborate inquiry, found the charge proved, and
requested the A.S.E. to withdraw its members from the place in dispute.
The A.S.E. refused to accept the award, and withdrew from the Congress
(Annual Report of Trades Union Congress, 1899 ; History of British Trades
Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. ii., 1916, pp. 161-62, 165-67).
Apother case, in 1902, was adjudicated on in a similar way, where
the United' Kingdom Amalgamated Smiths and Strikers complained of the
Associated Blacksmiths' Society, which was found to blame {ibid. p. 208).
2 In view of the failure of the Trades Union Congress to equip its
ParUamentary Committee with any staff that would enable it to deal
with these problems, the Fabian Society started in 191 2 the Fabian
Research Department, to investigate and supply information upon these
and other questions. This organisation has now become the Labour
572 Thirty Years' Growth
During the whole of this century, in fact, the ParUa-
mentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, and the
Congress itself, have failed to grapple with the work that calls
out to be done by some national organisation of the Trade
Union world. After allowing to be created, on the one hand,
the General Federation of Trade Unions, abandoning to it the
whole function of insurance, together with the representation
of British Trade Unionism in the International Federation
of Trade Unions, and, on the other, the Labour Party, with
its inevitable absorption of the political activity of the Trade
Union world, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades
Union Congress has failed to recognise, and to concentrate
upon, the sphere that it had left to itself, namely, to become
the national organ for the improvement and development
of British Trade Unionism in its industrial aspect. Whilst
the Trades Union Congress has continued anxiously and
nervously to abstain from any attempt to demarcate the
spheres of rival Unions or to improve their mutual relations,
action which would have brought the Parliamentary Com-
mittee dangerously into conflict with one or other of its
constituents, and has confined its attention as much as
ever to the statutory and governmental reforms which its
various sections desired, it has been progressivf^ly over-
shadowed, on the political side, by the rise of the Labour
Party, to be described in a subsequent chapter.
Research Department, an independent federal combination of- Trade
Unions, Co-operative and Socialist societies, and other Labour bodies
(including the Labour Party, the Enghsh, Scottish, and Irish Trades
Union Congresses, the Co-operative Union, the Daily Herald, most of the
big Trade Unions, and some hundreds of Trade Councils, Local Labour
Parties, etc.), with individual students and investigators. It has its
offices at 34 Eccleston Square, London, S.W.i, next door to those of the
Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party ; issues to its members a
monthly bulletin of information, and has published many useful books,
pamphlets, and monographs. It answers a stream of questions from
Trade Unions all over the country on every conceivable point of theory or
practice ; it supplies particulars of rates of pay, hours of labour, and
conditions of employment in other trades ; and it is fretpiently employed
in helping to prepare cases for submission to Joint Boards or Arbitration
Tribunals. Its influential conduct of the " publicity " of the National
Union of Railwaymen in the 1919 strike has already been described.
A General Staff 573
Towards the end of 1919 the discontent of the Trade
Union world with the position and attitude of the Parha-
mentary Committee came to a head. The sudden railway
strike, described in this chapter, revealed the lack of any
organ of co-ordination in industrial movements which
inevitably affected the whole Trade Union Movement. The
Parhamentary Committee itself laid before a special Trades
Union Congress in December 1919 a report declaring that
" the need has long been recognised for the development of
more adequate machinery for the co-ordination of Labour
acti\'ities, both for the movement as a whole, and especially
for its industrial side. Again and again the lack of co-
ordination has resulted, not only in the overlapping of
administrative work, but also in unnecessary internal and
other disputes, invohdng vast financial and moral damage
to the whole Labour ^lovement. To do away with some
of this overlapping and to provide means of co-ordinating
the work of certain sections was the object with which the
Triple Industrial Alliance was founded by the Miners,
Railwaymen, and Transport Workers, and the same object
is behind the numerous steps towards closer unity which
have been taken in various industries and groups. The
Negotiating Committee, hastily improvised to deal with the
situation created by the railway strike this autumn, was
generally felt to have fulfilled, however imperfectly, a vital
need of Labour ; but it is clear that it ought not to have
been necessary to create, a new and temporary body to do
this work ; the necessary machinery should have been
already in existence in the form of a really effective central
co-ordinating body for the movement as a whole.
" It appears to us that the body which is required should
and must be developed out of the existing organisation of
the Trades Union Congress and out of its closer co-operation
with other sections of the working-class movement. At
present, the Standing Orders do not permit the Parha-
mentary Committee to undertake the work which is required.
Indeed, its functions, as they are now defined, are in great
574 Thirty Years' Growth
measure a survival from a previous period, when the chief
duties of the Congress were poHtical, and there existed no
separate poHtical organisation to express the policy and
objects of Labour. We accordingly suggest that the whole
functions and organisation of the Parhamentary Committee
demand revision, with a view to developing out of it a real
co-ordinating body for the industrial side of the whole Trade
Union Movement. It is also necessary to take into account
the relation of the reorganised Central Industrial Committee
to the other sections of the movement, and especially to the
Labour Party and to the Co-operative Movement.
" If a better central organisation could be developed both
on the industrial side and by the closer joint working
with the other wings of the working-class movement, a
vast development of the very necessary work of publicity,
information, and research would at once become possible.
The research, publicity, and legal departments now working
for the movement require co-ordination and extension
equally with its industrial and political organisation. The
research, publicity, and legal work now done by the Trades
Union Congress, the Labour Party, and the Labour Research
Department must be co-ordinated and greatly enlarged in
close connection with the development of the executive
machinery of the movement."
The proposal did not secure the approval of the Miners'
Federation, but the special Congress, by a very large
majority, passed the following resolution :
" That in view of the imperative need and demand for
a central co-ordinating body representative of the whole
Trade Union Movement and capable of efficiently deaUng
with industrial questions of national importance, the Parlia-
mentary Committee be instructed to revise the Standing
Orders of Congress in such manner as is necessary to secure
the following changes in the functions and duties of the
Executive body elected by Congress :
" (i) To substitute for the Parhamentary Committee a
The Officers 575
Trades Union Congress General Council, to be
elected annually by Congress.
" (2) To prepare a scheme determining the composition
and methods of election of the General Council.
" (3) To make arrangements for the development of
administrative departments in the offices of the
General Council, in the direction of securing
the necessary officials, staff, and equipment to
secure an efficient Trade Union centre.
" Further, in order to avoid overlapping in the activity
of working-class organisations, the Parliamentary Committee
be instiTicted to consult with the Labour Party and the
Co-operative Movement, with a view to devising a scheme
for the setting up of departments under joint control,
responsible for effective national and international service
in the following and any other necessary directions :
" {a) Research : To secure general and statistical in-
formation on all questions affecting the worker
as producer and consumer by the co-ordination
and development of existing agencies.
" (6) Legal advice on all questions affecting the collective
welfare of the members of working-class organ-
isations.
" (c) Publicity, including preparation 01 suitable Utera-
ture deahng with questions affecting the eco-
nomic, social, and poUtical welfare of the people ;
with machinery for inaugurating special pubhcity
campaigns to meet emergencies of an industrial
or pohtical character."
The Officers of the Trade Union Movement
If we survey the growth of the British Trade Union
Movement during the past thirty years, what is conspicuous
is that, whilst the Movement has marvellously increased in
mass and momentum, it has been marked on the whole by
576 Thirty Years' Growth
inadequacy of leadership alike within each Union and in
the Movement itself, and by a lack of that unity and per-
sistency of purpose which wise leadership alone can give.
Hence, in our opinion, the organised workers, whilst steadily
advancing, have not secured anything like the results,
either in the industrial or in the political field, that the
individual sacrifices and efforts in their cause might have
brought about. This deficiency in the brain-work of suc-
cessful organisation is very marked in the various sections
of the building trades, with their chaos of separate societies,
and in the engineering industry, with its persistence pf
competing Unions formed on inconsistent bases, its lack of
uniformity in Standard Rates, and its failure to devise any
plan of safeguarding Collective Bargaining in the various
systems of " Payment by Results." But it has been equally
apparent in the incapacity of the Trade Union Movement
as a whole to establish any central authority to prevent
overlapping organisations and demarcation disputes, and to
co-ordinate the efforts of the various sections of workers
towards a higher standard of life and greater control over
the conditions of their working lives. The British workmen,
it must be said, have not become aware of the absolute need
for what we may call Labour Statesmanship. They have
not yet learnt how, either in their separate Trade Unions
or in the Labour Movement as a whole, to attract and train,
to select and retain in office, to accord freedom of initiative
to and yet to control, a sufficient staff of qualified officials
capable not merely of individual leadership, but also of well
devised " team play " in the long-drawn-out struggle of the
wage-earning class for its " place in the sun." To this
constant falling short of the reasonably expected achieve-
ments is, we think, due the perpetual see-saw in Trade
Union policy : the Trade Unionists of one decade relying
principally on political action, to the neglect of the industrial
weapon, whilst those of a succeeding decade, temporarily
disillusioned with political action, rush wildly into strikes
and neglect the ballot-box. This change of feeling is due
The Branches ^yy
each time to the failure of Jihe results to come up to expecta-
tion. We shall understand some of the reasons for this
shortcoming if we examine how the Trade Union Movement
is, in fact, officered.
The affairs, industrial and political, of the six million
Trade Unionists, enrolled in possibly as many as fifty
thousand local branches or lodges (including a thousand
independent small local societies), are administeired by
perhaps 100,000 annually elected branch officials and shop
stewards. These may be regarded as the non-commissioned
officers of the Movement ; and it is fundamentally on their
sobriety and personal integrity, combined with an intimate
knowledge of their several crafts and a steadiness of judge-
ment, that the successful conduct of the branch business
depends. They continue to work at their trades, and
receive only a few pounds a year for all their onerous and
sometimes dangerous work. It is these non-commissioned
officers of the Trade Union army who keep the Trade Union
organisation alive. But they have neither the training, nor
the leisure, nor even the opportunity, so long as they remain
non-commissioned officers, working at their trades, to
formulate a detailed poHcy, or to supply the day-by-day
executive leadership to the particular Trade Union, or to
the Trade Union Movement. For the work of translating
into action, industrial or poUtical, the desires or convictions
of the whole body of the members, the Trade Union world
necessarily depends, in the main, on its salaried officers,
who devote the whole of their time to the service of the
Movement, in one or other capacity. Such a whole-time
salaried staff was slow to be formed. In 1850 it did not
exist at all. It probably did not in i860 number as many
as a hundred throughout the whole kingdom. In 1892, in
the first edition of this book, we put it approximately at 600.
In 1920, with a fourfold growth in membership, and (under
the National Insurance Act) a vast increase in the office
and financial business of the Trade Unions, we estimate the
total number of the salaried officers of all the Trade Unions
u
578 Thirty Years' Growth
and their federations (not including mere shorthand typists
and office-boys) at three or four thousand, of whom perhaps
one-tenth, in or out of Parliament, are engaged exclusively
on election and other poUtical work. But even on the
industrial side, Trade Union officials differ considerably in
the work they have to do, and the differences in function
result in marked varieties of type.
We have first the salaried officials of the skilled trades.
They are broadly distinguished from the officers of the
Labourers' Unions by the fact that they are invariably
men who have worked at the crafts they represent, and who
have usually served their society as branch secretaries.
We may distinguish among them two leading types, the
Administrator of Friendly Benefits, and the Trade Official.
To the type of Administrator of Friendly Benefits, the
school of William Allan, belong most of the General and
Assistant Secretaries at the head offices of the great Trade
Friendly Societies organisations in which the mass of routine,
financial, and other office business has become so great that
only the ablest men succeed in rising above it. Owing to the
continued increase in membership of the principal Unions,
to their tendency to amalgamate into larger and larger
aggregations, to the constant extension of friendly benefits,
and since 191 1 to the enormous addition to the work made
by the National Insurance Act, the administrative staffs of
the Unions have had to be doubled and quadrupled. But
the Trade Union official of this type, however great may
be his nominal position, has, during the past thirty years,
come to exercise less and less influence on the Trade Union
world. Rigidly confined to his office, he becomes in most
cases a painstaking clerk, and rises at the best to the level
of the shrewd manager of an insurance company. He passes
his life in investigating the claims of his members to the
various benefits, and in upholding, at all hazard of un-
popularity, a sound financial s^'stem of adequate contribu-
tions and moderate benefits. Questions of trade policy
interest him prmcipally so far as they tend to swell or
The Trade Official 579
diminish the number of his members in receipt of " Out of
Work Pay." He is therefore apt to be more intent on
getting unemployed members off the books than on raising
the Standard Rate of wages or decreasing the length of the
Normal Day. For the same reason he proves a tenacious
champion of his members' rights in all quarrels about
overlap and demarcation of work ; and it may happen that
he finds himself more often engaged in disputes with rival
Unions than with employers. He represents the most
conservative element in Trade Union life. On all occasions
he sits tight, and votes solid for what he conceives to be the
official or moderate party.
More influential in Trade Union politics is the salaried
officer of the other type. The Trade Official, as we have
called him, is largely the result of the prevalence, in certain
industries, of a complicated sj-stem of " Payment by Results."
We have already described how the cotton lists on the one
hand and the checkweigher clause on the other called into
existence a specially trained class, which has since been
augmented by the adoption of piecework Usts in boot and
shoemaking and other industries. The officers of this type
are professionals in the art of Collective Bargaining. They
spend their fives in intricate calculations on technical
details, and in conducting delicate negotiations with the
employers or their professional agents. It matters little
whether they are the general secretaries of essentially trade
societies, such as the federal Unions of Cotton-spinners and
Cotton-weavers, or the exclusively trade delegates of
societies with friendly benefits, such as the Steel-smelters,
the Boilermakers, and the Boot and Shoe Operatives. In
either case their attention is almost entirety devoted to the
earnings of their members. Alert and open-minded, they
are keen observers of market prices, emplo3^ers' profits, the
course of international trade, and everything which may
affect the gross product of their industry. They are more
acutely conscious of incompetency, whether in employer or
employed, than they can always express, Supporters of
580 Thirty Years' Growth
improved processes, new machinery, and " speeding up,"
they would rather see an antiquated mill closed or an
incompetent member discharged than reduce the Standard
Rate. Nor do they confine themselves exclusively to the
money wages of their clients. Among them are to be
found the best advocates of legislative regulation of the
conditions of employment, and whilst they have during
the present century fallen somewhat into the background
when wider political issues have come to the fore, the
elaboration of the Labour Code during the past fifty years
has been due, in the main, to their detailed knowledge and
untiring pertinacity.
The Trade Ofiicial, however, has the defects of his
qualities. The energetic workman, who at about thirty
years of age leaves the factory, the forge, or the mine, to
spend his days pitting his brains against those of shrewd
employers and sharp-witted solicitors, has necessarily to
concentrate all his energies upon the limited range of his
new work. As a Branch Secretary, he may have taken a
keen interest in the grievances and demands of other trades
besides his own. Soon he finds his duties incompatible
with any such wide outlook. The feeling of class solidarity,
so vivid in the manual working wage-earner, tends gradually
to be replaced by a narrow trade interest. The District
Delegate of the Boilermakers finds it as much as he can do
to master the innumerable and constantly changing details
of every variety of iron-ship, boiler, and bridge building in
every port, and even at every yard. The Investigator of
the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives is often
hard put to it to estimate accurately the labour in each of
the thousand changing styles of boots, whilst at the same
time keeping pace with ever-increasing complexity both of
machinery and division of labour. The Cotton Official,
with his bewildering lists, throws his whole mind into
coping with the infinite variety of calculations involved in
new patterns, increased speed, and every alteration of count
and draw and warp and weft. The Miners' Agents can
The Labour Organiser 581
seldom travel beyond the analogous problems of their own
industr}^ Such a Trade Official, if he has any leisure and
energy left at the end of his exhausting da^-'s work, broods
over larger problems, still special to his own industry. The
Secretary of a Cotton Union finds it necessary to puzzle his
head over the emploj^ers' contention that Bimetallism, or a
new Indian Factory Act, deserves the operatives' support ;
or to think out some way of defeating the evasions of the
law against over-steaming or of the " particulars clause."
The whole staff of the Boilermakers will be absorbed in
considering the effect of the different systems of apprentice-
ship in the shipyards, or the proper method of meeting the
ruinously violent fluctuations in shipbuilding. The Miners
will be thinking only of the technical improvement of the
conditions of safety of the mine, or of the way to protect
the interests of the hewer in an " abnormal place." And
the modern Knight of St. Crispin racks his brains about
none of these things, but is wholly concerned with the evil
of home work, and whether the inspection of small work-
shops would be more rigidly carried out under the Home
Office or under the Town Council. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the Trade Officials are characterised by an
intense and somewhat narrow sectionalism. The very know-
ledge of, and absorption in, the technical details of one
particular trade, which makes them such expert specialists,
prevents them deyeloping the higher qualities necessary for
the political leadership of the Trade Union world.
In another class stand the organisers and secretaries of
what used to be called the Labourers' Unions, and are now
styled Unions of General Workers — a less stable class,
numbering in 1892 about two hundred, and in 1920 possibly
ten times as many. In contrast with the practice of the old-
established societies these officers have at no time been
always selected from the ranks of the workers whose affairs
they administer.^ In " revivalist " times the cause of the
^ For instance, Henry Taylor, the coadjutor of Joseph Arch in organ-
ising the agricultural labourers in 1872, was a carpenter ; Tom Mann,
582 Thirty Years' Growth
unskilled workers attracts, from the ranks of the non-
commissioned officers of other industries, men of striking
capacity and missionary fervour, such as John Bums and
Tom Mann, who organised and led the dock labourers to
victory in 1889. But these men regarded themselves and
were regarded more as apostles to the unconverted than as
salaried ofificers, and they ceded their posts as soon as com-
petent successors among their constituents could be found.
In the main the unskilled workmen have had to rely for
officers on men drawn from their own ranks. In not a
few cases a sturdy general labourer has proved himself a
first-rate administrator of a great national Union, But it
was a special drawback to these Unions in the early
days of their development that the " failures," wlio drift
from other occupations into the ranks of general labour,
frequently got elected, on account of their superior educa-
tion, to posts in which personal self-control and persistent
industry, are all-important. Nor were the duties of an
organiser of unskilled labourers in old days such as developed
either regular habits or business capacity. The absence of
any extensive system of friendly benefits reduced to a
minimum the administrative functions and clerical labour
of the head office. The members, for the most part engaged
simply in general labour, and paid by the day or hour, had
no occasion for elaborate piecework lists, even supposing
that their Unions had won that full recognition by the
employers which such arrangements imply. On the other
hand, the branches of a Labourers' Union in those days
were, for one reason or another, always crumbling away ; and
the total membership was only maintained by perpetually
breaking fresh ground. Hence the greater part of the
for two years salaried Prusident of the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside
Labourers, has always been a member, and is now General Secretary, of
the Amalgamated Society of Engineers ; whilst Edward M'Hugh, for some
time General Secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, is a
compositor ; Mr. Charles Duncan, President of the Workers' Union, is an
engineer ; Mr. R. Walker, General Secretary of the Agricultural Labourers'
Union, was successively a shopkeeper and a railway clerk, and so on.
The General Workers 583
organiser's time was taken up in maintaining the enthusiasm
of his members,, and in sweeping in new converts. This
involved constant travelHng, and the whirl of excitement
implied in an everlasting round of missions in non-Union
districts. The typical organiser of a Labourers' Union in
1889-94 approximated, therefore, more closely than any
other figure in the Trade Union world, to the middle-class
conception of a Trade Union official. He was, in fact, a
professional agitator. He might be a saint or he might be
an adventurer ; but he was seldom a man of affairs.^
During the past quarter of a century these Unions of
Labourers, which are now better styled Unions of General
Workers, have changed in character, and are now often huge
national organisations of financial stabihty, administered by
^ The fervent energy of the typical official of the Labour Union of
that day was well described in 1894 in the following sketch by Mrs. Bruce
Glasier (Katherine Conway), a member of the " Independent Labour
Party." " He has his offices, but is generally conspicuous there from his
absence. Walter Crane's ' Triumph of Labour ' hangs on the wall, and
copies of The Fabian Essays, and the greater proportion of the tracts
issued by the Manchester or Glasgow Labour Presses, lie scattered over
the room. In England, Byron and Shelley, in Scotland, Byron and
Burns, are the approved poets. Carh'le and a borrowed Ruskin or two
are also in evidence, and a hbrary edition of Thorold Rogers' Work and
Wages. John Stuart ]\Iiirs Political Economy, side by side with a Student's
Marx, give proof of a laudable determination to go to the roots of the
matter, and to base all arguments on close and careful study. But the
call to action is never-ceasing, and train-travelling, if conducive to the
enormous success of new journalism, affords but httle opportunity for
serious reading, ' The daily newspapers are continually filled with lies,
which one ought to know how to refute,' and the situation all over the
globe ' may develop at any moment.'
" Yet, unlike the old Unionist leader, he is ever ready for the inter-
viewer or the sympathetic inquirer, of whatever class or sex. Right
racily he will describe the rapid growth of the movement since the great
dock strike of 1889, and show the necessity in deahng with such mixed
masses of men as fill the ranks of unskilled labour to-day, of continually
striking while the iron is hot, and of substituting a pohcy of coup d'itat
for the deliberate preparation of the older Unions. ' Lose here, win
there,' is our only motto, he says, resolutely determined to look at
defeat from the point of view of a general-in-chief, and not from the
narrower range of an officer in charge of a special division. At the
moment of surrender he may have been white to the lips, but the next
day will find him cheery and undaunted in another part of the country,
carrying on his campaign and enrolUng hundreds of recruits by the sheer
energy of his confident eloquence." {Weekly Sun, January 28, 1894.)
584 Thirty Years' Growth
men as competent as any in the Trade Union world. Their
officers, who have greatly increased in number, have elabor-
ated a technique of their own, combining an efficiency in
recruiting with an effective representation of their members'
case in negotiations with the employers, and before arbitra-
tion tribunals, which, particularly in such influential bodies
as the National Union of General Workers, the Dock, Wharf
and Riverside Labourers' Union, the Workers' Union and
the National Federation of Women Workers, brings them
much nearer what we have described as the Trade Official
than the typical labourers' organiser of 1889. The ex-
clusively women's Unions, among which the National
Federation of Women Workers is the only one of magnitude,
have been exceptionally fortunate in attracting and retain-
ing women of outstanding capacity — good organisers and
skilled negotiators — who have not only obtained for their
members a remarkable improvement in the conditions of
employment, but have, by their statesmanship, won a
position of outstanding influence in the Trade Union Move-
ment. It is, indeed, important to note that the accom-
plished officials of the larger Unions of General Workers,
and not those of women only, have become aware of a
diversity of view between the skilled craftsman with a
" vested interest " in his trade, and the unskilled or, as,
they prefer to call them, the semi-skilled or general workers,
bent on being considered qualified for any work which the
employer has to give. Hence these officials sometimes
take a larger view of Labour questions than the trade
officials of the skilled crafts. They tend to be in favour of
the amalgamation of separate societies into " One Big
Union " ; of much more equality of remuneration among
aU manual workers ; of the " open door " to capacity ; of
equal rates for men and women on the same job ; and of a
levelling up of the Standard of Life of the lowest section of
the workers. This leads thcni instinctively to a co-ordinated
use of the industrial and the political weapons.
Some of these officials, however, are paid in a manner
Payment by Results 585
which may exercise an adverse influence on their activity.
A new method of remuneration of the officers of a Trade
Union has been devised. In one case the very able General
Secretary of a Union of skilled craftsmen, whose services
have been in the past most valuable to the trade, is reputed
to be paid so much per member per annum, and with the
great increase in membership to be making an income four
times as large as the salaries of the General Secretaries
of great Trade Unions. In another very extensive Union
of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, practically the
whole staff is paid " by results," the Branch Secretaries, for
instance, by rule retaining for themselves " six per cent on
the contributions, levies and fines received from the members
of the Branch on behalf of, and remitted to, the Chief
Office " ; and being paid also " a procuration fee of is." for
" introducing new members " into the Approved Society ;
and for the extra work involved in disputes, a further " 6d.
when under 25 members are affected, and is. for the first
25 or over ; 2s. for the first 50 ; 6d. per 50 or part thereof
afterwards." This method of remunerating Trade Union
officials — analogous to that successfully employed by the
Industrial Insurance Companies for their agents — has certain
attractions. A fairly adequate remuneration for the posi-
tion and work can thus be allotted to the officer, without
its amount being specifically voted by the members or
appearing in the accounts in such a way as to offend the
rank and file by a contrast bet\^een their weekly wage for
manual labour and the Standard Rate of what is essentially
a different occupation. It is, however, rightly regarded as
a pernicious system. The practice of " paying by results "
is alleged to lead sometimes to reckless recruiting, to "in
and out " Trade Unionism, and even to wholesale poaching
among the membership of other Unions ; and it produces
in the Trade Union world a type of " business man " more
concerned for numbers than for raising the Standard of
Life of the members he has enrolled, or for co-operation
with other Trade Unions for their common ends.
u 2
586 Thirty Years' Growth
Quite another tj^pe, of more recent introduction, is the
Political Officer of the Trade Union world. He may be
merely the Registration Officer or Election Agent serving
the local Labour Party and the Labour Candidate in a
particular constituency ; he may be simply a Labour
M.P. ; he may be the secretary or staff officer of a great
Trade Union or powerful federation, or, indeed, of the
Labour Party itself, devoting himself to poHtical functions ;
he may combine with one or other of these posts, or some
other Trade Union office, that of a Member of Parliament ;
but he is distinguished from the typical General Secretary,
Trade Official or Labour Organiser — from one or other
of which he has usually developed — by his absorption
in the political work of the Movement, either inside the
House of Commons or outside it, within one constituency
or in a wider field. He may not alwa^'s hold a political
office. A marked feature of the past decade has been
the frequency and the amount of the calls upon the time
of the Trade Union leaders who are not in Parliament,
for public service in which their own Unions have no special
concern. The Trade Union official has to serve on innumer-
able public bodies, nearly always without pay of any kind,
from local Pension or Food or Profiteering Act Committees,
or the magisterial bench, up to National Arbitration
Tribunals, official Committees of Enquiry or Royal Com-
missionS. Such a man is perpetually devoting hours every
day to the consideration and discussion, and sometimes to
the joint decision, of issues of public character, in which it
is his special function to represent, not the opinions and
interests of the particular Trade Unionists by whom he is
paid, but the opinions and interests of the whole wage-
earning class. All this important work, a twentieth century
addition to the functions of the Trade Union staff, and not
alone the increasing calls of Parliament, is tending more
and more to the development of what we have called the
Political Officer of the movement.
These three or four thousand salaried officials of the
Method of Selection 587
Trade Union world, whatever their several types, and
whatever the duties to which they are assigned, are, with
insignificant exceptions, all selected in one way, namely by
popular election by the whole body of members, either of
their respective Unions, or of particular districts of those
Unions. They are, in the skilled trades, required to be
members of the Union making the appointment ; and in
order to gain the suffrages of their fellow-members they must
necessarily have made themselves known to them in some
way. They are, accordingly, selected ahnost invariably
from among what we have described as the non-commissioned
officers of the Movement, those who are serving or who have
served as Branch Secretaries, or other local officers. They
have thus all essentially the same training — a training which
has no more reference to the work of an administrator of
Friendly Benefits than to that of a Political Officer. What
happens is that the popular workman is, by the votes
of his fellow-workers, taken suddenly from the bench, the
forge or the mine, at any age from 30 to 50, with no large
experience than that of a Branch Official, and put to do the
highly speciaUsed work of one or other of the types that
we have described.^ It is a further difficulty that such
training and experience that an individual Trade Unionist
may have had, and such capacity as he may have shown,
whilst they may secure his election to a salaried office, or
his promotion from one such office to another, will be held
to have no bearing on the question of which oftice he will
be chosen to fill. The popular Branch Secretary, who has
led a successful strike, may be elected as General Secretary
in a head office where his work will be mainly that of the
manager of an insurance company. The successful Trade
Official, exp(?rt at negotiating complicated changes in piece-
work hsts, may find himself elected as the Union's candidate
1 It is, we think, only the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation that
had laid down and acted on the principle of entrusting the appointment
of salaried of&cials to the Executive Committee, on the express ground
that popular election by ballot is not the right way to select administrative
officers.
588 Thirty Years' Growth
for Parliament ; and will, in due course, be sent to the
House of Commons to deal on behalf of the whole wage-
earning class, with political issues to which he has never
given so much as a thought. The Trade Union secretary,
whose daily work has trained him to the meticulous super-
vision of the friendly benefits, may find himself perpetually
called away from his office to represent the interests of
Labour as a member of Royal Commissions and Committees
of Enquiry on every imaginable subject.
With such imperfect methods of selection for office, and
with so complete a lack of systematic training for their
onerous and important functions, it is, we think, a matter
for surprise that Trade Union officials should have \Aon a
well-deserved reputation for knowledge and skill in negotia-
tions with employers. But their haphazard selection and
inadequate training are not the only difficulties that they
have to overcome. Trade Union officials are nearly always
overworked and expected to become specialist experts in
half-a-dozen techniques ; they are exposed to harassing
and demoralising conditions of life, and they are habitually
underpaid. The conditions of employment and the terms
of service which the Trade Unions, out of ignorance, impose
on those who serve them, far from being conducive to
efficient administration and wise leadership, are often
disgracefully poor. In November 1919 the National Union
of Railwaymen set a notable example in raising the salaries
of their two principal officers to £1000 a year each. • But
this is wholly exceptional. Even now, after the great rise in
the cost of living, the salary of the staff officer of an important
and wealthy Trade Union rarely exceeds ;^'400 or £500 a
year, without any provision for any other retiring allowance
than the Union's own Superannuation Benefit of ten or
twelve shilHngs per week, if such a benefit exists at all.
The average member forgets that what he has to compare
the Secretary's salary with is not the weekly wage of the
manual working members of the Union, but — on the very
doctrine of the Standard Rate in which they all believe —
" Sweating " of Officials 589
the remuneration given by " good employers " for the kind
of work that the Secretary has to perform. When we
remember that the modern Trade Union official has to be
constantly travelHng and consorting with employers and
officials of much higher standards of expenditure than his
own, and when we realise the magnitude and financial im-
portance of the work that he performs, the smallness of
the salary and the lack of courtesy and amenity accorded
to the office is almost ludicrous. The result is that the
able and ambitious young workman in a skilled trade is not
much tempted by the career, even if he regards it as one
of Trade Union leadership, unless he is (as so many are) an
altruistic enthusiast ; or unless his ambitions are ultimately
political in character. The able young workman will both
rise more rapidly and enjoy a pleasanter life by eschewing
any ostensible service of his fellow- workmen, and taking
advantage of the eagerness of intelligent employers to
discover competent foremen and managers, nowadays not
altogether uninfluenced by the sub-conscious desire to divert
from Trade Unionism to Capitalism the most active-minded
of the proletariat. Nor does the danger. to the Trade Union
world end wdth the refusal of some of its ablest 3^oung
members to become Trade U/iion officials. The inferiority
of position, alike in salary, in dignity and in amenity, to
which a Trade Union condenms its officers, compared
with that enjoyed by men of corresponding ability and
function in other spheres, puts a perpetual strain on the
loyalty of Trade Union officials. They are constantly being
tempted away from the service of their fellows by offers of
appointments in the business world, or by Employers'
Associations, or in Government Departments. And there
are other evils of underpayment. A Trade Union official
whose income is insufficient for his daily needs is tempted to
make unduh^ liberal charges for his travelling expenses, and
may well find it more remunerative to be perpetually multi-
plying deputations and committee meetings away from home
than to be attending to his duties at the office. He may
590 Thirty Years' Growth
be driven to duplicate functions and posts in order to make
a living wage. The darkest side of such a picture, the
temptation to accept from employers or from the Govern-
ment those hidden bribes that are decorously veiled as
allowances for expenses or temporary salaries for special
posts, is happily one which Trade Union loyalty and a
sturdy sense of working-class honour have hitherto made it
seldom necessary to explore. But such things have not
been unknown ; and their underl3dng cause — the unwise
and mean underpayment of Trade Union officials — deserves
the attention of the Trade Union world.
We have so far considered the officials of the Trade
Union world merely as individual administrators. This,
indeed, is almost the only way in which their work is
regarded by their members. It is remarkable how slow
the Trade Union world is to recognise the importance, to
administrative or political efficiency, of the constitution of
a hierarchy, a group or a team. Where a great society has
a salaried staff of half-a-dozen to a score of officials — under
such designations as General Secretary, Assistant Secretaries,
President, Members of Executive Council or District Dele-
gates, Organisers or Investigators — ^it is almost invariable
to find them all separately (fleeted by the whole body of
members, or what is even more destructive of unity, by
different district memberships. We only know of one
example in the Trade Union world — that of the Iron and
Steel Trades Confederation — in which the responsible
Executive Committee itself appoints the official staff upon
which the performance of the work depends. All the
salaried officers of a Trade Union, whatever their designa-
tions or functions, can usually claim to have the same,
and therefore equal authority, namel}^ their direct election
by the members. This results in the lack of any organic
relation not only between the Executive Committee and
the District Officers who ought to be its local agents, but
even between the Executive Committee and the General
Secretary and Assistant Secretaries. The Executive Com-
Office Organisation 5gi
mittee can shunt to purely routine work a General Secretary
whom it dislikes, and an unfriendly General Secretary
can practically destroy the authority of the Executive
Committee. In some cases the work of the ofhce is in
practice divided up amongst all the salaried staff, Executive
Councillors, General Secretary, and Assistant Secretaries
indiscriminately, each man doing his own job in the way
he thinks best, and any consultation or corporate decision
being reduced to a minimum. There is, in fact, no guar-
antee that there will be any unity of poUcy within an
Executive Committee elected by a dozen different districts,
or between an Executive Committee and its leading officials,
who are elected at different times for different reasons.
The members may choose a majority of reactionary Execu-
tive Councillors and simultaneously a revolutionary General
Secretary. In nearly all Unions any suggestion as to the
desirability of adopting the middle-class device of entrusting
a responsible Executive Committee with the power of choos-
ing its own officers has been resented as undemocratic. ^ In
some Unions the indispensable amount of unity is secured,
not without internal friction, by the presence of some domin-
ant personality, who may be a secretary or president, or
merel}^ a member of the Executive Committee. The same
drawback is seen m the constitutions of such wider federa-
tions as the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party.
^ It would clearly be an advantage if the distinction between those
responsible for pohcy (whether designated Executive Councillors, President
or otherwise) and those whose function should be executive only, were
fully borne in mind. Whilst the former should certainly be elected by,
and held responsible to, the membership, it is submitted that experience
shows the advantage of purely executive officers — which may be what
the secretaries and district delegates should become — being appointed by,
and held responsible to, those who are elected.
At least, a separation should be made between persons elected to be
responsible for policy, and officers employed for tasks requiring specialised
training (such as the whole of the insurance work of the Union and of its
Approved Society ; its constantly increasing statistical requirements, and
its legal business). Such officers should certainly be appointed, not elected ;
and should take no part in the decision of issues of policy, even as regards
their own department. Speaking generally, much more specialisation of
functions and officers should be aimed at in all Unions of magnitude.
592 Thirty Years' Growth
The result is that the Trade Union Movement has not yet
evolved anything in the nature of Cabinet Government,
based on unity of policy among the chief administrators,
nor do we see any approach to the Party System, which in
our national politics alone makes Cabinet Government pos-
sible. It looks as if any Democracy on a vocational basis
must inevitably be dominated by a diversity of sectional
interests which does not coincide with any cleavage in
intellectual opinions. From the standpoint of corporate
efhciency the drawback is that the sectional divergencies
are always interfering with the formulation and unhesitat-
ing execution of decisions on wider issues, on which it would
be advantageous for the Movement as a whole, in the
interests of all, to have an effective general will, even if it
be only that of a numerical majority.
Finally, it is a great drawback to the Trade Union world
that it possesses no capital city, and no central headquarters
even in London. Its salaried officials, on whom it depends
for leadership and policy, are scattered all over the country.
The General Secretaries of the great Trade Friendly Societies
and of the Unions of General Workers are dispersed between
London, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Liver-
pool, and Leicester. The officials of the Cotton Operatives
are quartered in a dozen Lancashire to\\^s, and those of the
Miners in every coalfield. The District Delegates of the
Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades and the organisers of
the Dockers and the Seamen are stationed in all the prin-
cipal ports. We have seen how little the Trades Union
Congress, meeting once a year for less than a week, supplies
any central organ of consultation or direction. The meet-
ing in London, every few weeks, of the two or three dozen
members of \he Parliamentary Committee and the Executive
Committee of the Labour Party is wholl}^ inadequate for
the constant consultation upon pohcy, the mutual com-
munication of each other's immediate projects, and the
taking of decisions of common interest that the present
stage of the Trade Union Movement requires. Probably
A Central Institute in Westminster 593
no single thing would do so much to increase the efficiency
of the Trade Union world as a whole as the provision of an
adequate Central Institute and general office building in
Westminster, at which could be concentrated all the meet-
ings of national organisations, federations and committees ;
and which would make at any rate possible the constant
personal communication of all the different headquarters. ^
^ Such a building was decided on in 1918-19 by joint and separate
conferences of the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party, as a
" Memorial of Freedom and Peace," in memory of those who lost their
Uves in the Great War. It is, however, by no means certain that the
necessary large cost will be subscribed.
CHAPTER X
THE PLACE OF TRADE UNIONISM IN THE STATE
[189O-I920]
In 1890 Trade Union organisation had alread}^ become a
lawful institution ; its leading members had begun to be
made members of Royal Commissions and justices of the
peace ; they were, now and then, given such Civil Service
appointments as Factory Inspectors ; and two or three of
them had won their way into the House of Commons. But
these advances were still exceptional and- precarious. The
next thirty years were to see the legal position of Trade
Unionism, actually in consequence of renewed assaults,
very firmly consolidated by statute, and the Trade Union
claim to participation in all public enquiries, and to nominate
members to all governmental commissions and committees,
practically admitted. Trade Union representatives have
won an equal entrance to local bodies, from Quarter Sessions
and all the elected Councils down to Pension and Food and
Profiteering Act Committees ; an influential Labour Party
has been established in Parliament ; and most remarkable
of all, the Trade Union itself has been tacitly accepted as
a part of the administrative machinery of the State.
It is a characteristic feature of Trade Union history, at
the end as at the beginning of the record of the past hundred
years, that we have to trace the advance of the Movement
through a series of attacks upon Trade Unionism itself. It
594
The Labour Commission 595
is in this light that we regard the Royal Commission on
Labour set up by the Conservative Government of 1891.
Its professed purpose was to enquire into the relations
between Capital and Labour, with a view to their improve-
ment. But its composition was significantly weighted
against the wage-earners. It is true that, in the large total
membership, seven Trade Union officials were included,
among them being Mr. Tom Mann ; but whilst the great
employers who sat on the Commission were supported by
legislators, lawyers, and economists of their own class,
ha\'ing substantially their own assumptions and opinions,
the Trade Unionist minority was allowed no expert colleagues.
From the start the Commission set itself — probably quite
without any consciousness of bias — to discredit alike the
economic basis of the workmen's combinations, the methods
and devices of Trade Unionism, and the projects of social
and economic reform that were then making headway in
the Trade Union world. In the end, after two years' ex-
haustive enquiry, which cost the nation nearly £50,000, the
majority of the Commissioners either found it impossible, or
deemed it inexpedient, to report anything in the nature of
an indictment against Trade Unionism in theory or practice ;
and could not bring themselves to recommend any, even
the slightest, reversal of what had, up to the very date of
the report, been conceded or enacted, whether with regard
to the recognition of Trade Unions, the collective regulation
of wages, the legal prescription of minimum conditions of
emplo}Tnent or the political activities of the workmen's
combinations. The majority of the Commissioners — it is
significant that they were joined by three out of the seven
Trade Unionists — contented themselves with deprecating,
and mildly arguing against, every one of the projects of
reform that were then in the air. What is interesting is
the fact that the most reactionary section of the Com-
mission nearly persuaded their colleagues of the majority to
recommend putting Trade Unions compulsorily into the
strait -jacket of legal incorporation, involving them in
596 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
corporate liability for the acts of their officers or agents,
with the object of inducing the Unions to enter — not, as is
usual in Collective Bargaining, into treaties defining merely
minimum conditions — but into legally binding obligations
with the employers, in which the Unions would become
liable in damages if any of their members refused to work
on the collectively prescribed terms. At the last moment
the majority of the Commissioners recoiled from this pro-
posal, which was left to be put forward as a separate report
over the names of seven Commissioners. The Labour
Minority Report, signed by four ^ out of the seven Trade
Unionist Commissioners, whilst protesting strongly against
any interference with Trade Union freedom, took the form
of a long and detailed plea for a large number of immediately
prac$cable industrial, economic, and social reforms, envisaged
as step by step progress towards a complete transformation
of the social order. 2
The Commission had no direct results in legislation or
administration ; but the Board of Trade set up a Labour
Department, appointed a number of Trade Unionists as its
officials or correspondents, and started the admirably edited
monthly Labour Gazette. The next move came in the form
of an assault on the legal position of Trade Unionism, which,
in one or other manifestation, held the stage for more than
a decade.
For a quarter of a century the peculiar legal status which
had been conferred upon a Trade Union by the Acts of
1871-76 was not interfered with by the lawyers. At the
^ William Abraham (South Wales Miners), J. Mawdsley (Cotton-
spinners), Michael Austin, M.P. (Irish Labour), and Tom Mann (Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers).
^ For the Labour Commission see its Report and Evidence, published
in 1892-94 in many volumes, the Report itself being C. 2421 of 1894. yVn
epitome was published as The Labour Question, by T. G. Spyers, 1894 ;
see also " The Failure of the Labour Commission," by Mrs. Sidney Webb,
in Nineteenth Century, 1893. The Trade Unionist Minority Report had a
wide circulation as an Independent Labour Party pam]>hlct. It reads,
in 1920, curiously prophetic of the actual legislativtt and administrative
changes that have taken place.
Civil Actions 597
close of the nineteenth century, when Trade Unionism had
by its very success again become unpopular among the
propertied and professional classes, as well as in the business
world, a new assault was made upon it.
Actions for Damages
The attempt to suppress Trade Unionism by the criminal
law was practically abandoned.^ But officers of Trade
Unions found themselves involved in civil actions, in which
the employers sued them for damages caused by Trade
Union activity which the judges held to be, although not
criminal, nevertheless wrongful. What could no longer
be punished by imprisonment with hard labour might at
any rate be penalised by heavy damages and costs, for which
the Trade Unionist's home could be sold up. The Trade
Unions in 1875-80, though, as we have described, warned
1 For half a century after the repeal of the Combination Acts in
1824-25 the controvers}'- as to the legal position of Trade Unionism was
always muddled up, in the minds of lawyers as well as economists and
the pubhc, wdth that of phj-sical violence. Because angry strikers here
and there committed assaults, and occasionally destroyed property, it
was habitually assumed, as it still is by some people thinking themselves
educated, that Trade Unionism practically depended on, and inevitably
involved, personal molestation of one sort or another. This led magis-
trates, right down to 1891, occasionally to regard as a criminal offence,
under the head of " intimidation," any threat or warning uttered by a
Trade Unionist to an employer or a non-unionist workman, even if the
consequences alluded to were of the most peaceful kind. In 1891 a
specially constituted Court of the Queen's Bench Division definitely laid
it down that " intimidation," under the Act of 1875, was confined to the
threat of committing a criminal offence against person or tangible
property (r^Iemorandum b}^ Sir Frederick PoUock in Appendix to Report
of Royal Commission on Labour, C. 7063 ; see also Law Quarterly Review,
January 1892 ; Industrial Democracy, by S. and B. Webb, Appendix I.,
1897 ; Gibson v. Lawson, and Curran v. Treleaven, 1891, 2 Q.B. 545).
^Magistrates continued, however, for some time to treat unfairly such
breaches of pubhc order as " obstructing the thoroughfare " or committing
acts of annoyance to the pubUc, when committed in connection with a
strike of which they disapproved, which would not be proceeded against
as criminal if they had been done by an excited crowd of stockbrokers
in the City, by the audience of a street-corner preacher, or by a gathering
of the Primrose League. Such discrimination by the pohce or the
magistrate is unjust.
598 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
by their friendly legal advisers, had not realised the import-
ance of insisting that the elastic and indeterminable law of
conspiracy should be put on a reasonable footing ; and
though they were, by 1891, fairly safe from its use to re-
inforce the criminal law, the lawyers found means, under the
figment of " conspiracy to injure," to bring under the head
of torts or actionable wrongs the most ordinary and non-
criminal acts of Trade Union officers which would have been,
if done by one person only, without conspiracy, no ground
for legal proceedings. After-ages will be amazed at the
flagrant unfairness with which the conception of a " con-
spiracy to injure " was applied at the close of the nineteenth
century. The greatest possible injury to other people's
income or business, not involving the violation of a recognised
legal right, if committed by employers for the augmentation
of their profits (even in " restraint of trade," by means of
the deliberate conspiracy of an association), was held not
to be actionable.^ But it was held to be an actionable
wrong to the employer for a couple of men to wait in the
street, in a town many miles distant, for the purpose of
quite quietly and peacefully persuading a workman not to
enter into a contract of service. The most pacific " picket-
ing " of an employer's premises, though admittedly no
longer a criminal act, was, if done in concert, held to be an
actionable wrong. If a Trade Union Secretary published
a perfectly accurate list of firms which were " non-Union,"
with the intention of warning Trade Unionists not to take
service with them, this gave each of the " blacklisted "
firms the right to sue him for damages. It was held to be
ground for damages for a Trade Union official merely to
request one firm not to suppl}^ goods to another ; or to ask
an employer not to employ any particular person ; or even
to urge the members of his own Union quite lawfully to
come out on strike on the termination of their engagement
^ Mogul Steamship Company v. M'Gregor, Gow & Co. (1892), A.C. 25 ;
Scottish Co-oporative Wholesale Society v. Glasgow Fleshcrs' Trade
Defence Association (1897), 3.5 Sc.L.R. 645; see History of Co-cperation
in Scotland, by William Maxwell, 1910, p. 349.
" Conspiracy to Injure " 599
of service, if the object of the strike was considered by the
Court to be to put pressure on the will of some other employer
or some other workman. And whilst any solicitation or
persuasion to break a contract of service by a Trade Union
official was certainly actionable, it became doubtful whether
he would not be equally liable if he had carefully abstained
from, and had really not intended, any such suggestion,
whenever the members of his Society became so influenced
by his action, or were thought by the Court to have been so
influenced, that they, spontaneously and against his desires,
impetuously came out on strike before their notices had
expired.^ It was a further aggravation, of which less
advantage was actually taken by emploj^ers in this country
than b}^ those of the United States, that where the Court
was convinced that an actionable wrong was threatened or
intended, it was possible very summarily to obtain an
injunction against its commission, any breach of which was
punishable by imprisonment for contempt of Court. It
became, therefore, at least theoretically possible that almost
any action by a Trade Union by which an employer felt
himself injured might be summarily prohibited by per-
emptory inj unction ; and some things were thus prohibited,
even in this country.
^ For all these cases see Industrial Democracy, by S. and B. Webb,
Appendix I., 1897 ; Trade Union Law, by H. Cohen and G. Howell, 1901 ;
The Law Relating to Trade Unions, by D. R. C. Hunt, 1902 ; Trade Unions
and the Law, by G. F. Assinder, 1905 ; The Present and Future of Trade
Unions, by A. H. Ruegg and H. Cohen, 1906 ; Report of Royal Commission
on Trade Disputes, Cd. 2825, 1906 ; Temperton v. RusseU (1893), i Q.B.
715 ; 62 L.T.Q.B. 412 ; 62 L.T. 78 ; 41 W.R. 565. 57. J. P. 676 ; TroUope
and Others v. The London Building Trades Federation and Others (1895),
72 L.T. 342 ; II T.L.R. 280 ; Pink v. The Federation of Trade Unions
(1893), 67 L.T. 258 ; 8 T.L.R. 216, 711 ; 36 S.T. 201 ; J. Lyons and Son
V. Wilkin (1896), i Ch. 811 ; the same again (1899), i Ch. 255 ; AUen v.
Flood (1898), A.C. i; 67 L.J. Q.B. 119; 77 L.T. 717; 14 T.L.R. 125;
46 W.R. 258 ; 47 S.J. 149 ; 62 J. P. 595 ; Quinn v. Leathern (1901), A.C.
495; 70L.J.P.C. 76; 85 L.T. 289; 17 T.L.R. 749; 50 W.R. 139; 65 J. P.
708 ; W.N. 170. For foreign comments see La Situation juridiqiie des
Trade Unions en Angleterre, by Morin (Caen, 1907) ; Le Droit d' Association
en Angleterre, by H. E. Barrault (Paris, 1908) ; Das engl sche Gewerk-
vereinsrecht se f i8yo, by F. Haneld, 1909.
6oo The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
The Taff Vale Case
All this development of the Law of Conspiracy and the
Law of Torts, though it went far to render nugatory the
intention of the Legislature in 1871-76 to make lawful a
deliberately concerted strike, left unchallenged the position
of the Trade Union itself as immune from legal proceedings
against its corporate funds, an anomalous position whicli
everybody understood to have been conceded by the Acts
of 1871-76. In 1901, after thirty years of unquestioned
immunit}^ the judges decided, to the almost universal
surprise of the legal profession as well as of the Trade Union
world, that this had not been enacted by Parliament. In
1900 a tumultuous and at first unauthorised strike had
broken out among the employees of the Taff Vale Railway
Company in South Wales, in the course of which there had
been a certain amount of tumultuous picketing, and other
acts of an unlawful character. In the teeth of the advice
of the Company's lawyers, Beasley, the General Manager,
insisted on the Company suing for damages, not the
workmen guilty of the unlawful acts, but the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants itself ; and on fighting the case
through to the highest tribunal. After elaborate argument,
the Law Lords decided that the Trade Union, though
admittedly not a corporate body, coula be sued in a
corporate capacity for damages alleged to have been caused
by the action of its officers, and that an injunction could be
issued against it, restraining it and all its officers, not merely
from criminal acts, but also from unlawfully, though with-
out the slightest criminality, causing loss to. other persons.
Moreover, in their elaborate reasons for their judgement, the
Law Lords expressed the view that not only an injimction
but also a mandamus could be issued against a Trade Union,
requiring it to do anything that any person could lawfully
call upon it to do ; that a registered Trade Union could be
sued in its registered name, just as if it were a corporation ;
The Taff Vale Case 60 1
that even an unregistered Trade Union could be made
collectively liable for damages, and might be sued in the
names of its proper officers, the members of its executive
committees and its trustees ; and that the damages and
costs could be recovered from the property of the Trade
Union, whether this was in the hands of separate trustees
or not. The effect of this momentous judgement, in fact,
was, in flagrant disregard of the intention of the Government
and of Parhament in 1871-76, to impose upon a Trade
Union, whether registered or not, although it was still
denied the advantages and privileges of incorporation,
complete corporate hability for any injury or damage caused
by any person who could be deemed to be acting as the
agent of the Union, not merely in respect of any criminal
offence which he might have committed, but also in respect
of an}^ act, not contravening the criminal law, which the
judges might hold to have been actionable. The Amalga-
mated Society of Railway Servants, which had not authorised
the Taff Vale strike nor any wrongful acts that were com-
mitted by the strikers, but which, after the strike had
occurred, had done its best to conduct it to a successful
issue, and had paid Strike* Benefit, was compelled to pay
5^23,000 in damages, and incurred a total expense of £42,000.^
^ TaflE Vale Railway Company v. Amalgamated Society of Railway
Servants (1901), A.C. 426 ; 70 L.J.K.B. 905 ; 85 L.T. 147 ; 17 T.L.R.,
698 ; 65 J. P. 596 ; 50 W.R. 44 ; Report of Royal Commission on Trade
Disputes, 1906, Cd. 2825 ; The Law and Trade Unions : A Brief Review
of Recent Litigation, specially prepared at the instance of Richard Bell, M.P.,
1 901 ; Statement by the Parliamentary Committee on the Taff Vale Case,
1902 ; History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis,
vol. ii. 1916, pp. 201-2 ; Trade Union Law, by H. Cohen and George
Howell, 1901 ; The Legal Position of Trade Unions, by H. H. Slesser and
W. S. Clark, 1912 ; Industrial Democracy, by S. and B. Webb, Introduc-
tion to the 1902 edition, pp. xxiv-xxxvi. It does not appear that, in
the strictly legal sense, the Taff Vale judgement was unwarranted. Though
the Act of 1 87 1 had been supposed to prevent a Trade Union from being
proceeded against, it contained no exphcit grant of immunity from being
made answerable for any damage that might be wrongfully caused. In
fact, both the 1871 Act and that of 1876 expressly provided that the
registered Trade Union itself should be liable to be brought into Court
for the petty penalties instituted for failure to supply the Registrar with
copies of rules and balance-sheets ; and also that the trustees of a
6o2 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
It has been estimated that, from first to last, the damages
and expenses in which the various Trade Unions were cast,
owing to this, and the other judgements against Trade
Unions and Trade Union officials personally, amounted to
not less than £200,000.
The little world of Trade Union officials, already alarmed
at the prospect of being individually sued for damages,
was thrown into consternation by the Taff Vale judgement,
which seemed to destroy, at a blow, the status that had
been, with so much effort, acquired in 1871-76. The full
extent of the danger was not at first apprehended. Why,
it was asked, should not the Trade Union rules, and the
instructions of Trade Union Executive Committees, expressly
forbid the commission by officials of any wrongful acts ?
It was only gradually realised that, under the figment of
" conspiracy to injure " that the lawyers had elaborated,
even the most innocent acts, which an individual could
quite lawfully commit, might be held wrongful and action-
registered Union should sue and be sued on its behalf. \^rhat the Act
of 1 87 1 did was to reheve the Trade Union from its character of criminality
by reason of its purposes being in rest];pint of trade, and of its character
of illegality from the same cause ; and to prohibit legal proceedings
directly to enforce certain agreements among its members, or between it
and its members, or among different Unions. These were assumed to be
all the cases that could arise. It seems to have been taken for granted
Jjy the Minority of the Trade Union Commission of 1869, by the Home
Office in 1870-71, by the Parliament of 1871-76, and the Royal Com-
mission on Labour in 1893, that an unincorporated body could not be
sued for damages in tort any more than for a civil debt. But in the
following years, without any reference to Trade Unionism, the Courts
successively enlarged their procedure so as to admit of any group of
persons having a common interest being made parties to a " representative
action " (Duke of Bedford v. Ellis, 1901, A.C. i, where the tenants of
shops in Covent Garden were parties). This enabled even an unregistered
Trade Union to be sued (Yorkshire Miners' Association v. Howden, 1905,
A.C. 256). In 1893, and again in 1895, actions against unregistered Trade
Union organisations had been maintained in the lower Courts (TroUope
and Others v. The London Building Trades Federation and Others, 1S95,
72 L.T. 342 ; II T.L.R. 2S0 ; W.N. 45 ; Pink v. The Federation of Trades
and Labour Unions, etc., 1893, 67 L.T. 258 ; 8 T.L.R. 21O, 711 ; 36 S.J.
201). But the.sc had not been noticed by the Trade Union Movement as
a whole ; and they had not been seriously defended, not fully argued,
and not carried to the highest tribunal.
Trade Unionism disarmed 603
able if they were committed by or on behalf of an association
to the pecuniary injury of any other person ; and that there
was no assignable limit, as the cases had shown, either to
what might be held to be wrongful acts, or to the nature
or amount of the damage that the Courts might hold to
have been caused by such acts in the ordinary course of
any extensive strike. Moreover, under the ordinary law
of agency, the most expUcit prohibition of unlawful acts in
the rules of the association, coupled with the most scrupulous
care in the Executive Committee in framing its instructions
to its ofhcials, w^ould not prevent the Trade Union from being
held liable for any pecuniary injury that might be caused,
even in defiance of instructions and in disobedience to the
rules, by any of its officers acting within the scope of their
employment ; or, indeed, by any member, paid or unpaid,
whom the Courts might hold to be acting as the agent of
the Union. And as every stoppage of work, however lawful,
necessarily involved financial loss to the employers, it could
be foreseen that even the most carefully conducted strike
might be made at least the occasion for costly Utigation,
and probably the opportunity for getting the Trade Union
cast in swingeing damages. The immediate result w^as very
largely to paralyse the Executive Committees and responsible
officials of all Trade Unions, and greatly to cripple their
action, either in securing improvements in their members'
conditions of employment or in resisting the employers'
demands for reductions. In particular, the general advances
for which the railway workers were asking were delayed.
The capitahsts did not fail to use the opportunity to break
down the w^orkmen's defences. Trade Unionism had to a
great extent lost its sting. ^
^ The number of stoppages through disputes known to the Labour
Department of the Board of Trade, which between 1891 and 1899 had
never been fewer than 700 in a year, did not again reach this figure for a
whole decade ; and sank in 1903-5 — years during which trade was
checked, and some reduction of wages took place — to only half the
number. Of the 135 claims to the Strike Benefit admitted by the General
Federation of Trade Unions in 1903, we read that " no less than 130 have
6o4 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
Though it took some time for the Trade Union world to
reahse the peril, the effect on the Movement was profound.
Up and down the country every society, great and small,
and practically every branch, raUied in defence of its right
to exist. The first result was to make the newly-formed
Labour Party, which will be hereafter described, and which
had hitherto hung fire, into an effective political force. The
effect of the Taff Vale judgement was, in 1902-3, to
double, and by 1906-7 to treble the number of adliering
Trade Unions, and to raise the affiliated membership of the
Party to nearly a million. As the Dissolution of Parliament
approached, the Trade Unions organised a systematic
canvass of all prospective candidates, making it plain that
none would receive working - class support unless they
pledged themselves to a Bill to undo the Taff Vale judgement
and put back Trade Unionism into the legal position that
Parliament had conferred upon it in 1871. When the
General Election at last took place, in January 1906, the
Labour Party (still known as the Labour Representation
Committee) put no fewer than fifty independent candidates
in the field, of whom, to the astonishment of the poUticians,
twenty-nine were at the head of the poU.^
The Trade Disputes Act
The first claim of the Labour Party was for the statutory
reversal of the Taff Vale judgement, which every one now
admitted to be necessary. The question was what should
be done. There were, substantially, only two alternatives.
One was that, in view of the difficult}^ of effectually main-
taining it against legal ingenuity, the Trade Unions should
been caused by attempts on the part of employers to encroach upon tlie
recognised conditions prevaihng in the particular trades " (Fifth Annual
Report of the Federation, 1904, p. 11).
^ In addition, twelve workmen, mostly miners, were elected under the
auspices of the Liberal Party. Nearly all these came over to the Labour
Party in 1910 (History of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey,
1912).
Alternative Remedies 605
forgo their position of being outside the law, and should
claim, instead, full rights, not only of citizenship, but actually
of being duly authorised constituent parts of the social
structure, lawfully fulfilling a recognised function in in-
dustrial organisation. But for the Trade Union to become,
not merely an instrument of defence, but actually an organ
of government in the industrial world, required a great
advance in pubhc opinion. It assumed an explicit recogni-
tion of the legitimate function of the Trade Union, as the
basis of a Vocational^emocracy, exercising a definite share
in the control and administration of industry. It involved a
complete transformation of both the criminal and the civil
law, so that workmen's combinations and strikes, together
with peaceful picketing in its legitimate form, should be
unreservedly and exphcitly legahsed ; the law of civil
conspiracy practically abrogated, so that nothing should be
unlawful when done in concert with others which would
not be unlawful if done by an individual alone ; and reason-
able Hmits set to UabiUty for the acts of agents and to the
scope for injunctions, so that a Trade Union Executive
would be able both to know the law and to be ensured
against its perversion. The alternative was to make
no claim for the profound advance in Trade Union status
that would be involved in such a pohcy ; to forgo any
hope of satisfactory or complete amendment of the law,
and merely to re-enact the exceptional legislation of 1871,
this time specifically insisting that a Trade Union, whether
registered or not, should be put outside the law, and made
expressly immune from legal proceedings for anything,
whether lawful or unlawful, done by its officers or by itself.
The outgoing Conservative Government had appointed
in 1903 a small Royal Commission to consider the state
of the law as to Trade Unionism, before which the Trade
Unions had refused to give evidence, because the Commis-
sion, which was made up almost entirely of lawyers, in-
cluded no Trade Unionist. This Commission, it is beheved,
was told privately not to report until after tlie General
6o6 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
Election, in order tliat the Conservative Government
might not be embarrassed by the dilemma. Early in
1906 it reported in favour of the Trade Union accepting full
responsibility for its own actions, subject to considerable,
but far from adequate, amendments of the law.^ This
proposal was definitely rejected by the Labour Party, which
introduced a Bill of its own, merely restoring the position
of 1871. When the Liberal Government brought in a Bill
very much on the lines of the Commission's Report, there
was a dramatic exhibition of the electoral power that Trade
LTnionism, once it is roused, can exercise in its own defence.
Member after member rose from different parts of the House
to explain that they had pledged themselves to vote for the
complete immunity which Trade Unions were supposed to
have been granted in 1871. Nothing less than this would
suffice ; and the most powerful Government hitherto known
was constrained, in spite of the protests of lawyers and
employers, to pass into law the Trade Disputes Act of 1906.2
The Trade Disputes Act, which remains (1920) the main
charter of Trade Unionism, explicitly declares, without any
qualification or exception, that no civil action shall be
entertained against a Trade L^nion in respect of any wrongful
act committed by or on behalf of the Union ; an extra-
ordinary and unlimited immunity, however great may be
the damage caused, and however unwarranted the act,
which most lawyers, as well as all employers, regard as
nothing less than monstrous.^ At the same time the Act,
* Report of Royal Commission on Trade Disputes and Trade Combina-
tions, Cd. 2825.
» 6 Edward VIT. c. 47.
* Trade Unionists would be well advised not to presume too far on
this apparently absolute immunity from legal proceedings. It must not
be imagined that either the ingenuity of the lawyers or the prejudice of
the judges has been exhausted. It has already been urged that the
immunity of a Trade Union from being sued should be regarded as im-
plicitly limited to acts done in contemplation or furtlierancc of a trade
dispute ; but such a limitation has so far been negatived (Vachcr t;.
London Society of Compositors, 29 T.R. 73). It is now suggested that
the immunity might one day be lield to be limited to acts committed by
a Trade Union ui the exercise of its specifically Trade Union functions, or
The Trade Disputes Act 607
whilst not abrogating or even defining the law as to civil
conspiracy, gives three exceptional privileges to Trade
Union officials by declaring that, when committed in con-
templation or furtherance of a trade dispute, (i) an act done
in concert shall not be actionable if it would not have been
actionable if done without concert ; (2) attendance solely
in order to inform or persuade peacefully shall be lawful ;
and (3) an act shall not be actionable merely by reason of
its inducing another person to break a contract of employ-
ment, or of its being an interference with another person's
business, or with his right to dispose of his capital or his
labour as he chooses. These exceptional statutory privileges
for the protection of Trade Union officials in the exercise
of their lawful vocation, and of " pickets " in the perform-
ance of their lawful function — in themselves a triumph for
Trade Unionism — ^have ever since excited great resentment
in most of those who are not wage-earners. Some friends
of the Trade Unions expressed at the time the doubt whether
the policy thus forced upon ParUament would prove, in
the long run, entirely in the interest of the Movement ; and
whether it would not have been better to have chosen the
bolder poUcy of insisting on a complete reform of the law,
for the " statutory objects " of Trade Unions as defined by the Act, and
not to acts which the Court might hold to be beyond its legitimate scope,
or not specifically connected \\"ith what they might in their wisdom con-
sider to be the principal purpose of a Trade Union. (But see Shinwell v.
National Sailors' and Firemen's Union, 1913, a decision of the Scottish
Court of Session, Umiting the Uabihty of a Union to reimburse its trustees
for damages incurred by them.) Thus, a new Tafi Vale case, at a moment
when pubhc opinion was exceptionally hostile to Trade Unionism, is by
no means impossible. Similarly, Trade Union officials should remember
that their privileged position is confined to a trade dispute, which, as
specifically defined in the Act, does not include all strikes ; and what hmits
the Courts might set to the phrase is uncertain. Moreover, the Trade
Disputes Act does not repeal other statutes ; and Trade Union officials
have been fined for persuading sailors not to embark, in contravention of
the Merchant Shipping Acts. The Trade Disputes Act does not protect
officials committing illegahties other than those to which it expressly
refers, or under circumstances other than those indicated. See Valentine
V. Hyde (1919) ; Conway v. Wade (1908), A.C. 506; Larkin v. Belfast
Harbour Commissioners (1908), 2 Ir.K.B.D. 214 ; Legal Position of Trade
Unions, by H. H. Slesser and W. S. Clark, 1912.
6o8 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
to which, when properly reformed, Trade Unions should be
subject in the same way as any other associations. The
lawyers, as it proved, were not long in taking their revenge.
The Osborne Judgement
This time the legal assault on Trade Unionism took
a new form. The result of the dramatic victory of the
Trade Disputes Act, and of the activity of the Labour
members in the House of Commons, was considerably to
increase the influence of the Labour Party in the country,
where preparations were made for contesting any number of
constituencies irrespective of the convenience of the Liberal
and Conservative parties. The railway companies, in
particular, found the presence in Parliament of the secretary
of the railwaymen's principal Trade Union very inconvenient.
Within a couple of years of the passing of the Trade Disputes
Act, on July 22, 1908, one of the members of the Amalgam-
ated Society of Railway Servants took legal proceedings to
restrain it from spending any of its funds on pohtical objects,
contending that this was beyond the powers of a Trade
Union. Such a contention found no support among eminent
lawyers, several of whom had formally advised that Trade
Unions were undoubtedly entitled to undertake political
activities if their rules authorised such action and a majority
of their members desired it. W. V. Osborne, the dissentient
member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants,
took a different view ; and, hberally financed from capitalist
sources, carried his case right up to the highest tribunal.
As a result, in December igog, as in 1825, 1867-71, and
igoi-6, every Trade Union in the land found its position
and status once more gravely impugned. In what became
widely known as the Osborne Judgement, the House of Lords,
acting in its judicial capacity as the highest Court of Appeal,
practically tore up what had, since 1871, been universally
understood to be the legal constitution of a Trade Union. ^
1 A verbatim rrjKirt of the proceedings (November 190S) in the Court
The Osborne Judgement 609
The decision of the judges in the Osborne case throws
so much hght, not only^n the status of Trade Unionism in
English law, but also on the animus and prejudice which
the Trade Disputes Act and the Labour Party had excited,
that we think it worth treating at some length. Formally
this judgement decided only that W. V. Osborne, a member
of the Walthamstow Branch of the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, was entitled to restrain that Trade
Union from making a levy on its members (and from using
any of its funds) for the purpose of supporting the Labour
Party, or maintaining Members of Parliament. But in
the course of that decision a majority of the Law Lords,
therein following all three judges of the Court of Appeal,
laid it down as law (and thereby made it law until Parlia-
ment should otherwise determine), {a) that although Parlia-
ment has always avoided any express incorporation of Trade
Unions, these were all now to be deemed to be corporate
bodies, formed under statute, and not unincorporated groups
of individual persons ; (&) that it follows, by an undoubted
principle of English law, that a body corporate, created
under statute, cannot lawfully do anything outside the
purposes for which the statute has incorporated it ; (c) that
as the purposes for which Trade Unions are incorporated
have to be found somewhere authoritatively given, the
definition which Parliament incidentally enacted in the
Trade Union Act of 1876 must be taken to enumerate,
accurately and exhaustively, all the purposes which any
group of persons falling within that definition can, as a
corporate body, lawfully pursue ; and [d) that the payment
of the salaries and election expenses of Members of Parlia-
of Appeal in Osborne v. Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was
published by the defendants (Unity House, Euston Road, London). The
House of Lords' judgement was given on December 21, 1909, when it was
widely commented on. The most convenient analysis is that by Professor
W. M. Geldart, The Osborne Judgment and After, 19 10, and The Present
Law of Trade Disputes and Trade Unions, 1914. See " The Osborne
Revolution," by Sidney Webb, in The English Review for January 191 1 ;
and My Case, by W. V. Osborne, 1910,
X
6io The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
ment, and indeed, any political action whatsoever, not being
mentioned as one of these purposes and not being con-
sidered by the judges incidental to them, could not lawfully
be undertaken by any Trade Union, even if it was formed,
from the outset, with this purpose duly expressed in its
original rules, and even if all its members agreed to it, and
continued to desire that their organisation should carry
it out.
This momentous judgement destroyed, at a blow, the
peculiar legal status which Frederic Harrison had devised
for Trade Unionism in 1868, and which ParUamcnt thought
that it had enacted in 1871-76. The statutes of 1871 and
1876, which had always been supposed to have enlarged the
freedom of Trade Unions, were now held to have deprived
these bodies of powers that they had formerly enjoyed. It
was not, as will be seen, a question of protecting a dissentient
minority. Whether the members were unanimous, or
whether they were nearly evenly divided, did not affect the
legal position. Trade Unions found themselves suddenly
forbidden to do anything, even if all their members desired
it, which could not be brought within the terms of a clause
in the Act of 1876, which Parliament (as Lord James of
Hereford emphatically declared) never meant to be taken
in that sense. " What is not within the ambit of that
statute," said Lord Halsbury, " is, I think, prohibited both
to a corporation and a combination." This was the new
limitation put on Trade Unions. All their educational
work was prohibited ; all their participation in municipal
administration was forbidden ; all tlioir association for
common purposes in Trades Councils and the Trades Union
Congress became illegal. The judges stopped the most
charactiristic and, as was supposed, the most constitutional
of the tliree customary ways that (as we have shown in our
Industrial Democracy) Trade Unions pursued of enforcing
their Common Rules, namely, the Method of Legal Enact-
ment ; grave doubt was thrown on the legality of some of
the divelopment^ of their second way, tlic Method of Mutual
Development of Law 6ii
Insurance ; whilst the way that the House of Lords expressly
prescribed was exactly that which used to give rise to so
much controversy, namely, the Method of Collective Bargain-
ing, with its concomitant of the Strike. So topsy-turvy a
view of Trade Unionism, a view which seems to have arisen
from the judges' ignorance of its two centuries of history,
could not have survived open discussion, and therefore
could hardly have been taken by even the most prejudiced
Parliament. ' •
The Development of English Law
What was the explanation of the view of the Trade
Union constitution that the judges took ? The English
Courts of Justice, it must be remembered, have peculiar rules
of their own for the construction of statutes. WTien the
plain man wants to know what a document means, he seeks
every available explanation of the intention of the author.
When the historian inquires the purpose and intention of
an Act of Parliament, he considers all the contemporary
evidence as to the minds of those concerned. The Courts
of Law, for good and sufficient reasons, debar themselves
from going behind the face of the document, and are there-
fore at the mercy of all the unstudied ineptitudes of House
of Commons phraseology. Along with this rigour as to the
intention of a statute, the English and American judges
combine a capacity for developments of doctrine in the
form of legal principles which is, we believe, unequalled in
other judicial systems. Now, the subject of corporations
is one of those in which there had been, among the past
generations of English lawyers, a silent and almost unself-
conscious development of doctrine, of which, in Germany,
Gierke had been the great inspirer, and Maitland in this
country the brilliant exponent.^ Our English law long
rigidly refused to admit that a corporate entity could arise
1 Political Theories of the Middle Ages, by O. Gierke, with introduction
by F. W. IMaitland, 1900 ; see also the works of J. N. Figgis,
6i2 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
of itself, without some formal and legally authoritative act
of outside power. How, it was asked, except by some
definite act of creation by a superior, could the persona fida
come into existence ? How, otherwise (as Madox quaintly
puts it), could this mere " society of mortal men " become
something " immortal, invisible, and incorporeal " ? ^ As a
matter of fact, associations or social entities of all sorts
always did arise, without the intervention of the lawyers,
and nowaday* they arise with amazing ease, without any act
of creation by a superior ; and when the Enghsh lawyers
refused to recognise them as existing, it was they who were
irrational, and the common law itself that was at fault.
Nowadays we Uve in a world of social entities of all sorts, and
of every degree of informality, corporate entities that to the
old-fashioned lawyers are still legally non-existent as such —
clubs and committees of every possible kind ; groups and
circles, societies and associations for every conceivable
purpose ; unions and combinations and trusts in every
trade and profession ; schools and colleges and " University
Extension Classes," often existing and spending and acting
most energetically as entities, having a common purse and
a single will, in practice even perpetual succession, and (if
they desire such a futile luxury) a common seal, without any
sort of formal incorporation. Gradually English lawyers
(whom we need not suspect of reading Gierke, or even, for
that matter, Maitland) were unconsciously imbibing the
legally heterodox view that a corporate entity is anji:hing
which acts as such ; and so far from making it impossible for
the persona ficta to come into existence without a formal act
of creation, they had been, by little alterations of procedure
and imperceptible changes in legal principles, sometimes by
harmless little dodges and fictions of the Courts themselves,
coming near to the practical result of putting every associa-
tion which is, in fact, a social entity, however informal
in its constitution, and however " spontaneous " in its
origin, in the same position of a persona Jida, for the purpose
* Firnia Burgt, by T. Madox, 1726, pp. 50, 279.
Social Entities 613
of suing and of being sued, as if it had been created by a
formal instrument of incorporation, decorated by many
seals, and procured at vast expense from the post-Reforma-
tion Pope himself ; or as if it had been expressly incorporated
by the Royal Charter of a Protestant King or the private
statute of a Victorian ParUament.
Now this development of legal doctrine to fit the circum-
stances of modem social Ufe is, when one comes to think of
it, only common sense. If twenty old ladies in the work-
house club together to provide themselves with a special
pot of tea, and agree that one among them shall be the
treasurer of their painfully-hoarded pennies as a common
fund, they do, in fact, create a social entity just as real
in its way as the Governor and Company of the Bank of
England. Why should not the law, if it ever comes to
hear of the action of the twenty old ladies in the workhouse,
deal with the situation as it really is, according to their
wishes and intentions, withouf inquiring by what formal
act of external power a persona ficta has been created ; and
therefore without demanding that the old ladies shall first
procure a charter of incorporation from the Pope, from the
King, or from Parliament ? And considering that Trade
Unions were now in fact social entities, often having
behind them more than a hundred years of " perpetual
succession " ; counting sometimes over a hundred thousand
members moving by a single will ; and occasionally accumu-
lating in a common purse as much as half a million of
money, the Law Lords might well think it absurd and
irrational of Parliament to have decided in 1871-76, and
again in 1906, to regard them as unincorporated groups of
persons, having, in a corporate capacity, no legally enforce-
able obligations and hardly any legally enforceable rights.
It may have been absurd and irrational, but what right —
so the Trade Unionists asked — had the judges to change
the law ?
Whatever may be the justification for the momentous
change in the law which the Six Judges (namely, the three
6i4 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
members of the Court of Appeal, and three out of the five
Law Lords, all of whom agreed in the series of propositions
that we have cited) suddenly, without Parliamentary
authority, of their own motion effected, it created an in-
tolerable situation. There was, in the first place, the
application of the doctrine of ultra vires to corporate entities
quite unaware of its existence. It was all very well, in
order to fit the law to the facts, to throw over the old legal
doctrine that the persona ficta of a corporation could only
come into existence by some formal act of incorporation by
an external authority. But then it plainly would not do
to retain, as the Six Judges quite calmly retained, the
severe limitations on the action of statutory corporate
entities which is involved in the doctrine of ultra vires, and
which, as Lord Halsbury put it, was to prohibit them from
doing what they liked. The argument for that principle is
that such a corporate entity owes its existence entirely to
the statutory authority by which it is created ; that the
legislature has brought it into being for certain definite
purposes ; that for those purposes and no others the ex-
ceptional powers of a corporation have been conferred upon
it ; that as such it is, in a sense, the agent whom the com-
munity has entrusted with the execution of these functions,
and who cannot therefore (even if all the constituent mem-
bers of its body so agree and desire) assume any other
purposes or functions. But any such doctrine of tdtra vires
can have no rational application to the corporate entitv
formed by the twenty old ladies in the workhouse for their
private pot of tea. If we are going, in effect, to treat as
corporate entities all sorts of spontaneously arising associa-
tions, such as an unregistered Trade Union (and some of
the wealthiest and most powerful Trade Unions were still
unregistered), or such as an Employers' Association (which
was hardly ever a registered body) — corporate entities which
were, in fact, lawfully in existence long before the Act of
1876 — we must give up the fiction that the purposes of these
associations have been authoritatively fixed and defined in
A Miscarriage of Justice 615
advance by Parliament in such a way that the members
themselves, even when they are unanimous and when they
are acting in strict accord with their constitution and rules,
cannot add to or alter the objects or methods of their
organisation. WTiat was logically required, in fact, was
not the arbitrary identification of spontaneously arising
associative entities with legally created corporations, but
the formulation of a new conception as to the functions and
legal rights that such spontaneously arising associative
entities — to which the limitations of legally created corpora-
tions could not be simply assumed to apply — should, as a
class, be permitted to exercise.
The Miscarriage of Justice
We come now to the second cardinal feature of the
decision of the Six Judges in 1909, in which they showed
both prejudice and ignorance. Having found that the Trade
Unions were, in fact, corporate entities, and that they had
been, in various clumsy ways, dealt with by Parhament
very much as if they were legally corporate entities — though
Parliament had advisedly abstained from incorporating
them, and had, indeed, always referred to them as being
what in fact they were, namely already existing and spon-
taneously arising associations, not created by its will —
the Six Judges took the view that some authoritative
specification of the objects and purposes of a Trade Union
had to be discovered by hook or by crook. It seems to
have been by them inconceivable (though Lord James
of Hereford, one of their own number, who had personally
taken part in all the legislation, expressly told them it was
in fact so) that no such specification should exist. They
accordingly found it in an enumeration which Parliament
had given in the Act of 1876 of all the various bodies
which were to be entitled to the privileges conferred bv the
Act — a definition introduced, so a well-informed writer men-
6i6 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
tioned in 1878, for the special advantage of Trade Unions ^
— principally to enable them to be registered by the Chief
Registrar of Friendly Societies. The Law Lords now held
that this definition must be deemed to be an exhaustive
enumeration, not merely of the kinds of societies to be
eligible for registration, but also of all the objects and pur-
poses that Parliament intended any of those bodies, whether
registered or unregistered, to be free at any time to pursue.
The result was that all Trade Unions and Employers'
Associations, and, indeed, all informal groups of workmen
or employers falling within this definition, suddenly found
themselves (to the complete anfezement of every one con-
cerned, including the lawyers) rigidly confined in their
action, even if all their members otherwise wished and
agreed, to matters which were specified in an enumerating
clause of an Act of Parliament of a generation before, which
had never before been supposed to have that meaning, or
to have any restrictive effect at all. We ought to speak
with proper respect of the judges, though sometimes, by
their curious ignorance of life outside the Law Courts, and
especially of " what everybody knows," they try us hard.
But it is necessary to state plainly, with regard to this part
of the Osborne Judgement, that to the present writers, as to
the whole British working class and many other people,
including lawyers, it seemed an astounding aberration,
amounting to a grave miscarriage of justice. Again, let it
be noted that Lord James of Hereford, who knew what
Parliament had intended, and what Trade Unions actually
were, expressly dissented from his colleagues on this point,
saying that the enumeration clause in the Act of 1876 was
never intended to be "a clause of limitation or exhaustive
definition " of objects and purposes ; and arguing that it
did not prevent a Trade Union from having other purposes,
or pursuing other methods, not in themselves unlawful,
even though these were not enumerated in the definition
• Conflicts of Capital and Labour, by G. Howell, ist edition, liJjS,
2nd edition, 1890. p. 479.
The Definition Clause 617
clause and were not even incidental to the purposes therein
enumerated. But what is the history of this definition
clause ? As it stands in the Act of 1876 it runs as follows :
The term " Trade Union " means any combination, whether
temporary or permanent, for regulating the relations between
workmen and masters, or between workmen and workmen, or
between masters and masters, or for imposing restrictive condi-
tions on the conduct of any trade or business, whether such
.combination would or would not, if the principal Act had not
been passed, have been deemed to have been an unlawful com-
bination by reason of some one or more of its purposes being
in restraint of trade.
Now, to the lay mind, this extremely loose enumeration ^
of kinds of societies seems plainly intended to bring within
its net, and therefore to admit to the advantages of the
Act, a wide range of existing, or possible associations of
different kinds. It was to inc^de all sorts of Employers'
Associations as well as Trade Unions. It was to include
bodies already in existence as weU as those to be formed in
the future. It was to include bodies seeking to impose
restrictive conditions " in restraint of trade," as well as
those having no such unlawful objects. It was to include,
therefore, bodies already enjo^dng a full measure of lawful
existence and legal recognition, as well as those for the first
time fully legahsed by the legislation of 1871-76. To the
logician it will be clear that we have here a case of classifica-
tion by type, not by delimitation. " It is determined,"
says WheweU and J. S. Mill, " not by a boundary line
without, but by a central point within ; not by what it
strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes ; by
an example, not by a precept." ^ Accordingly the clause
1 It should be recorded, as an instance of the prescience of Sir Charles
Dilke, that he is reported to have declared at the time that " the trade
union Acts were spoilt during their passage through the House by the
insertion of obscure definition clauses " {Conflicts of Capital and Labour,
by G. Howell, rSgo, p. 479).
2 Whewell, History of Scientific Ideas, vol. ii. p. 120 ; J. S. Mill, System
of Logic, vol. ii. p. 276.
X 2
6i8 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
names specifically one by one the various attributes, any
one of which is to be typical of the class. It sufficed for the
purpose to name only one attribute belonging to each body
which it was desired to include. What its other attributes
might be was irrelevant. It does not occur to the ordinary
reader, any more than to the logician, that the effect of the
clause is, not merely to include associations of different
kinds, but also to limit the legal freedom of all those associa-
tions, with all their varied functions, exclusively to the
purposes specified in the definition, which were merely re-
cited in order to bring a number of heterogeneous bodies
into one class. On the construction put upon this clause
by the Six Judges, the Act of 1876 was a measure which
deprived Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, many
of which had been for years lawfully in existence, without
any unlawful objects or methods, of a freedom that they
had up to then enjoyed ; it was an Act rigidly confining
their operations to a limited field, and for ever prohibiting
them (as Lord Halsbury expressly declared) from doing any-
thing not included in the list of functions incidentally then
and there given. It is safe to say that, to any historical
student who knows anything of the circumstances of the
case, such a supposition is preposterous. No Trade Union
and no Employers' Association was aware in 1876 that its
freedom was being thus restricted. Thomas Burt, M.P.,
and Lord James of Hereford (then Sir Henry James, M.P.),
who took part in passing the Act, certainly never dreamed
that they were doing anything of the sort. The Home
Office officials who prepared it, and Lord Cross (then Home
Secretary) who introduced it, quite plainly had not the
remotest notion that they were taking away from Trade
Unions (which they were anxious to legalise) any of the
functions which these Unions were in fact exercising, and
which such Trade Unions as were lawful associations were
already lauifidly exercising ; or that they were prohibiting
these Trade Unions from doing anything not specified in
the incidental enumeration of attributes that was then,
" Restraint of Trade " 619
merely for the purpose of including various kinds of associa-
tions, statutorily enacted. As a matter of fact, the defini-
tior^ause in the Act of 1876 was enacted merely to correct
in one small particular the definition clause in the Act of
1 87 1. That clause had defined a Trade Union as meaning
" such combination . . '. as would, if this Act had not
passed, been deemed to have been an unlawful combination
by reason of some one or more of the purposes being in
restraint of trade." This was found in practice inconvenient,
because it had inadvertently excluded from registration and
all the benefits of the Act those Trade Unions and Emploj^ers'
Associations which were already lawful associations, free
from any unlawful purpose. A Trade Union had to prove
that it was (but for the Act) an unlawful body before it
could be admitted to the advantages of the Act. It was
also inexpedient, because it actually offered an inducement
to Trade Unions to have purposes or methods " in restraint
of trade," in order to obtain these advantages. Now, sup-
posing that the Act of 1876 had not been passed, and that
the definition clause had remained in the terms of that of
the Act of 1871, would the Six Judges have equally con-
strued it as offering a complete and exhaustive enumeration
of the permissible activities of a Trade Union, making it
actually illegal for the future for any association of work-
men or employer to deal -wdth the conditions of employment,
except in ways that would {hut for the 1871 Act) have been
unlawful ? And if the definition clause in the 1871 Act
cannot be construed as (to use Lord James of Hereford's
words) " a clause of limitation or exhaustive definition " of
Trade Union activities, with what consistency can the
definition clause of the 1876 Act (which follows the same
wording, and merely extends the definition so as to take in
lawful as well as unlawful societies) be so construed ? Suc-
cessive Chief Registrars of Friendly Societies, like every one
else, had always understood the definition clause to be an
enabling clause, not a restricting one ; and they had accord-
ingly for a whole generation willingly registered rules pre-
620 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
sented to them by Trade Unions, including in their objects
and purposes all sorts of things not enumerated in the
definition, and not even incidental to any of the pu'^oses
therein enumerated. It was, in 1909, not at first realised —
certainly the Six Judges did not realise — how extensive and
how varied were the actually existing operations of Trade
Unions that they were rendering illegal. Not political action
alone, not municipal action alone, but any work of general
education of their members or others ; the formation of a
library ; the establishment or management ni " University
Extension " or " Workers' Educational Association " classes;
the subscription to circulating book-boxes ; the provision of
public lectures ; the establishment of scholarships at Ruskin
College, Oxford, or any other College — all of which things
were at the time actually being done by Trade Unions —
were all henceforth to be ultra vires and illegal. The two
hundred Trades Councils, local federations of different Trade
Unions for the purpose of dealing with matters of general
interest to workmen, which took no part in the collective
bargaining of any particular Trade Union, were probably
thereby equally made illegal ; though they were in 1876
already a quarter of a century old, and in 1909 numbered
nearly a million members. The annual Trade Union Con-
gress itself, then in its fortieth year, and dealing almost
exclusively with Parliamentary projects, came under the
same ban. The active participation which Trade Unions
had here and there taken in technical education, and. their
co-operation with the Local Education Authorities, which
had sometimes been found so useful, were certainly ultra
vires. One would sujiposc, strictly speaking, that a similar
illegality was to attach to all the vast " friendly society "
side of Trade Unionism, with its sick and accident and out-
of-work benefits — not one of them being referred to in the
definition which the Six Judges declared to contain an
exhaustive enumeration of the purposes and objects that
Parliament intended to permit Trade Unions to pursue.
But here the Six Judges saved themselves — though in a
Friendly Benefits 621
way logically destructive of their claim that the definition
clause itself was one of " exhaustive " enumeration of per-
missible Trade Union purposes — by holding that these
friendly benefits, though not mentioned in the definition
clause, were referred to elsewhere in the Act, and might be
regarded as incidental to the purpose of regulating the
conditions of employment. This, indeed, so far as benefits
paid to the workman himself are concerned, was a plausible
view. Strike Benefit, in particular, is plainly incidental to
striking, and sick benefit might conceivably be held to
protect the worker from industrial oppression whilst sick.
But the same cannot be said of the most widely spread of
all Trade Union benefits, the provision of funeral money on
a member's death. In some cases the Trade Unions were
actually paying for the funerals of their deceased members'
widows and orphan children. This was a mere act of
humanity to the deceased member's widow and orphans ;
and it could not, by any stretch of imagination, be supposed
to improve the workers' bargaining power, or to be in any
way incidental to the regulation or restriction of the condi-
tions of emplo^Tnent. Yet Funeral Benefit was in 1909 (as
it was in 1876) the one among the so-called " friendly "
benefits most universally adopted by Trade Unions.
More than a million Trade Unionists were thus effecting
through their societies a humble life insurance. This ex-
tensive fife insurance business of Trade Unions could not
be said to be in any way included in the definition clause
of the 1876 Act, even if the sick and unemplo3^ment benefits
were. If the judgements in the Osborne Case were correct,
the whole of this life insurance business of Trade Unions
(as distinguished from the sick and unemployment benefits),
or at least the whole of that relating to widows and orphans,
must be held to have been inadvertently prohibited by
Parliament in 1871 and 1876, and to have been ever since
itltra vires and illegal. It is impossible for the plain man to
avoid the conclusion, even though the six other authorities
take a contrary view, that Lord James of Hereford was
622 The Place of Trade Unioyiism in the State
right in declaring that the definition in the Act of 1876
was not meant by Pariiament to be " a clause of hmitation
or exhaustive definition " of the permissible purposes of a
Trade Union ; and, accordingly, that the Six Judges had
— presumably following quite accurately the narrow technical
rules of their profession — put upon the statute a construc-
tion which Parliament had in no way intended.
What then did Parliament intend to fix and define as the
permissible objects and functions of a Trade Union ? The
answer of the historical student is clear and unhesitating. ■
Parliament quite certainly intended, in 1871 and 1876, to
fix and define nothing of the sort ; but meant, whether
wisely or not, to leave Trade Unions as they then were —
as such of them, indeed, as had no unlawful purpose or
method had long legally been — namely, as free as any other
unincorporated groups of persons to take whatever action
they might choose, subject only to their own contractual
agreements, and to the general law of the land. From this
position we venture, as historians, to say that Parliament
did not, in 1871 or 1876, intentionally depart.
Finally, we have the argument of the Six Judges that,
seeing that the sole lawful purposes of a Trade Union are
" regulating the relations between workmen and masters,
or between workmen and workmen, or between masters and
masters," and "imposing restrictive conditions on the con-
duct of any trade or business," no action of a Parliamentary
or pohtical kind is within the definition, or even incidental
to anything therein. This view, to put it bluntly, showed
an ignorance of Trade Unionism, British industrial history,
and the circumstances not only of 1871-76, but also of
1908-9, which was as remarkable as it was deplorable.
On the face of it, to take first the words of the statute, the
most usual and the most natural way of " regulating " the
relations between people, and the most ob\ious expedient
for " imposing " restrictive conditions on industry, is an
Act of Parliament. It was to Acts of Parliament, as we
have abundantly shown in Industrial Democracy, that the
How Trade Unions Regulate 623
Trade Unions had for a century been looking, and were
in 1871-76, many of them, looking, for a very large part of
the " regulating " of industrial conditions, and of the
" restrictive conditions " that they existed to promote.
What the judges apparently forgot is that conditions of
'emplojTnent include not merely wages, but also hours of
labour, sanitary conditions, precautions against accident,
compensation for injuries, and what not. If the Six Judges
had remembered how, in fact, in Great Britain the great
majority of industrial relations were regulated, and how
the great mass of restrictive conditions were, in fact, im-
posed on industry ; or if they had had recalled to them the
long and persistent struggle of the Trade Unions to get
adopted the Factory Acts, the Mines Regulation Acts, the
"Truck Acts, the Shop Hours Acts, and so many more,
they could hardly have argued that such actions as en-
gaging in Parliamentary business, supporting or opposing
Parliamentary candidates, and helping members of Parlia-
ment favourable to " regulating," and " imposing restrictive
conditions " — actions characteristic of Trade Unions for
generations — were not incidental to these legitimate pur-
poses. As a matter of fact, the getting and enforcing of
legislation is, historically, as much a part of Trade Union
function as maintaining a strike.^ One Trade Union at
least, which no one ever dreamt to be illegal, the United
Textile Factory Workers' Association, has existed exclu-
sively for political action, and had no other functions. ^
This kind of Trade Union action is even antecedent in date
to any corporate dealing with employers. During the
whole two centuries of Trade Union history, as in Industrial
Democracy we have described, the Unions have had at their
disposal, and have simultaneously adopted, three different
^ George Howell, in his Conflicts of Capital and Labour, 1890, gives a
list, three pages long, of Acts which, as he expressly testifies from personal
knowledge, were promoted or supported by the Trade Unions ; and in
his Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders, 1902,
pp. 469-73, a still longer one.
* Industrial Democracy, pp. 124, 251, 258-60. '
624 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
methods of imposing and enforcing the Common Rules
which they sought to get adopted in the conditions of employ-
ment. From 1700 downwards they have used the Method
of Mutual Insurance ; from the very beginning of the
eighteenth century down to the present day the records
show them to have been continuously employing the Method
of Legal Enactment ; whilst only intermittently during the
eighteenth century, and not openly and avowedly until 1824,
could they rely on the Method of Collective Bargaining.
The Miners' Unions, and the Agricultural Labourers' Unions,
in particular, had been particularly active in support of the
extension of the franchise between 1863 and 1884. Even
the .expenditure of Trade Union funds on Parliamentary
candidatures was practised by Trade Unions at any rate
as early as 1868, as soon, in fact, as the town artisans were
enfranchised ; and the payment of Trade Union Members
of Parliament was begun as early as 1874, and had lasted
continuously from that date. Yet the Six Judges assumed,
apparently without adequate consideration, and certainly
on inaccurate information, that Parhament in 1876 intended
to authorise Trade Unions to pursue their first and third
methods, but intended to prohibit them, from that time
forth, from using the Method of Legal Enactment, just at
the moment when this latter was being most effectively
employed. It is, indeed, almost comic to remember that
the Bill which is supposed to have effected this revolution
in the Trade Union position was brought in by Lord Cross,
then Sir R. A. Cross, M.P., fresh from his election by a
constituency in which the Trade Unionists had been, poUtic-
ally, the dominant factor ; that it was debated in a House
of Commons in which the direct influence of the Trade
Unions was at the highest point that it had hitherto reached ;
tliat at the General Election of 1874, from which the members
had lately come, the Trade Unions, as we have described in
the present volume, had worked with might and main for
the rejection of candidates opposed to tlieir political claims,
and had had a much larger share than political historians
The Law Lords' Ignorance 625
usually recognise in the Gladstonian defeat ; that two
Trade Union members were actually then sitting in the
House, one. at least (Thomas Burt), being openly maintained
as a salaried representative of his Union, by a salary avowedly
fixed on a scale to enable him to sit in Parliament ; ^ that the
Conservative Government promptly introduced the particular
legal enactments to obtain which the Trade Unions had
spent their money, namely, the Nine Hours Bill, the Employer
and Workman Bill, and the Trade Union Bill ; and that
the Six Judges ask us to believe that the latter Bill, which
the Trade Union members themselves helped to pass, was
designed and intended to prevent Thomas Burt from
drawing a salary from the Northumberland Miners' Mutual
Confident Society whilst sitting in the House of Commons ;
to prohibit the Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident
Society, just because it was a Trade Union, from taking any
part in future elections in the Morpeth Division, and to
make the action of this and all other Trade Unions in parang
for political work and Parliamentary candidatures, even
with the unanimous consent of their members, from that
time forth illegal.
We have thought it worth while to place on record this
analysis of the legally authoritative part of the Osborne
Judgement, which, though partly modified by a subsequent
statute, has not been overruled, and is still legally authori-
tative, because it is of historical importance. It is significant
as showing how far the Courts of Justice were, as lately as
1909, still out of touch, so far as Trade Unionism is concerned,
either with Parliament or with the political economists.
The case was, however, of even greater import. The bias
and prejudice, the animus and partialit}^ — doubtless un-
conscious to the judges themselves — which were displayed
by those who ought to have been free from such intellectual
influences ; the undisguised glee with which this grave mis-
carriage of justice was received by the governing class, and
the prolonged delay of a professedly Liberal and Radical
^ d Great Labour Leader [Thomas Burt], by Aaron Watson, 1908.
626 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
Cabinet, and a professedly Liberal and Radical House of
Commons in remedying it, had a great effect on the minds
of the wage-earners, and contributed notably to the increas-
ing bitterness of feeling against the " governing class, '\ and
against a State organisation in which such a miscarriage of
justice could take place. We must, indeed, look behind
the legal technicalities of the Six Judges, and consider what
was the animus behind their extraordinary judgement. The
" subservience " of Parliament to the Trade Unions in
passing the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 had excited the
deepest resentment of the lawyers. The progress of the
Labour Party was causing a quite exaggerated alarm among
members of the governing class. What lay behind the
Osborne Judgement was a determination to exclude the
influence of the workmen's combinations from the political
field. This is really what the Osborne Judgement pro-
hibited. One irreverent legal critic, indeed, went so far
as to remark that the Law Lords were so anxious to make
it clear that Trade Unions were not to be entitled to pay for
Members of Parliament, that they failed to heed how much
law they were severally demolishing in the process ! It is
instructive to examine the arguments adduced by the Law
Lords and the judges on this point, apart from their decision
as to Trade Union status. These opinions could hardly be
deemed to be law, as they all differed one from another,
and none of them obtained the support of a majority of the
Law Lords. Such as they are, however, they seem not to
have been connected with Trade Unionism at all, but with
the nature of the House of Commons. One of the Law Lords
(Lord James of Hereford) merely objected to Trade Unions
paying a Member of Parliament who was (as was quite
incorrectly assumed) bound by a rule of the paying body
requiring him to vote in a particular way, not on labour
questions only, but on all issues that might come before
Parliament. Another Law Lord (Lord Shaw), with whom
Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton seemed to agree, held that
what was illegal was not the payment of Members of Parlia-
The Challenge 627
ment, but their subjection, by whomsoever paid, to a
" pledge-bound " party organisation (as the Labour Party
was alleged to be). Another judge (Farwell, L.J.) took a
different line, and held that it was illegal for a corporate
body to require its own members to subscribe collectively
towards the support of a Member of Parliament with whose
views they might individually not agree. What the historian
and the student of pohtical science will say is that these were
matters for legislation, not for the sudden intervention of the
judiciary. The House of Commons is prompt enough to
defend its own honour and its own " privilege " ; and the
function of the judges wiU begin when any of the acts
referred to has been made an illegal practice. In 1909, as
now, the practices complained of, whether or not they were
correctly described, and however objectionable to these
particular gentlemen they might be, were all lawful ; and
the judges and Law Lords were abusing the privileges of
their office by importing them to prejudice the legal issue.
The Osborne Judgement received the support, not only
of the great mass of property owners and professional men,
but also, though tacitly, of the Liberal and Conservative
Parties. A distinct challenge was thereby thrown down to
the Trade Union world. Not only were the activities of
their Unions to be crippled, not only was their freedom to
combine for whatever purposes they chose to be abrogated,
they were to be expressly forbidden to aspire to protect their
interests or promote their objects by Parhamentary repre-
sentation, or in any way to engage in politics. It was this
challenge to Organised Labour that absorbed the whole
interest of the Trade Union world for the next three or four
years.
The experienced Trade Union leaders did not forget
that it might well be a matter for Trade Union consideration
how far it is wise and prudent for a Trade Union to engag^
in general politics. We have elsewhere pointed out ^ with
some elaboration how dangerous it may become to the
* Industrial Democracy, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1897, pp. 838 40,
628 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
strength and authority of a Trade Union if any large section
of the persons in the trade are driven out of its ranks, or
deterred from joining, because they find their convictions
outraged by part of its action. Nothing could be more
unwise for a Trade Union than to offend its Roman Catholic
members by espousing the cause of secular education.^
But this is a point whicli each Trade Union must decide for
itself. It is not a matter in which outsiders can offer more
than counsel. It is clearly not a matter in which the dis-
cretion of the Trade Union, any more than that of an
individual employer, can properly be Umited by law. For
no Trade Union can nowadays abstain altogether from
poUtical action. Without co-operating with other Trade
Unions in taking Parliamentary action of a very energetic
and very watchful kind, it cannot (as long experience has
demonstrated to practically all Trade Unionists) protect
the interests of its members. Without taking a vigorous
part in promoting, enforcing, and resisting all sorts of
legislation afiecting education, sanitation, the Poor Law,
the whole range of the Factories, Mines, Railways, and
Merchant Shipping Acts, the Shop Hours, Truck, Industrial
Arbitration and Conciliation, and now even the Trade
Boards' Act, the Trade Union cannot properly fulfil its
function of looking after the regulation of the conditions of
employment. But this is not all. The interests of its
members require the most watchful scrutiny of the ad-
ministration of every public department. There is not a
day passes but something in Parliament demands its
attention. On this point Trade Union opinion is unanimous.
We have never met any member of a Trade Union — and
Osborne himself is no exception — who has any contrary view.
To suggest that there is anything improper, or against
public policy, for a Trade Union to give an annual retaining
fee to a Member of Parliament whom its members trust,
or to take the necessary steps to get that member elected,
* For this rt-ason the Trades I'nion Congress now refuses to entertain
any motion on this subject.
The Unfairness 629
in order to ensure that what the Trade Union conceives to
be its own interests shall be protected, was to take up a
position of extraordinary unfairness. When more than a
quarter of the whole House of Commons habitually consists,
not merely of individual employers, but actually of persons
drawing salaries or stipends from capitalist corporations of
one kind or another — when, in fact, the number of com-
panies of shareholders in railways, banks, insurance com-
panies, breweries, ocean telegraphs, shipbuilding yards,
shipping companies, steamship lines, iron and steel works,
coal mines, and joint stock enterprises of all sorts actually
represented in the House of Commons by their own salaried
chairmen, directors, trustees, managers, secretaries, or
solicitors is beyond all computation — the claim that there
is something improper, something inconsistent with our
electoral system, something at variance with the honourable
nature of the House of Commons, for the workmen's organisa-
tions to retain a few dozen of the Members whom the con-
stituencies (knowing of this payment) deliberately elect, or
to help such Members to provide their election expenses, is
an argument so extraordinary in its unfairness that it drives
the active-minded workman frantic with rage. It is no
answer to say that these representatives of capitalist cor-
porations are not expressly paid to sit in Parhament. They
are at any rate desired by their employers to sit, and per-
mitted by the law to receive their salaries notwithstanding
that they do sit. This was forbidden to representatives
of Trade Unions. That it should be illegal for the salaried
President or Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of
Railway Servants to sit in Parhament, when it is perfectly
legal for the much more generously salaried Chairman or
Director of a Railway Company to sit there, is an anomaly
hard for any candid man to defend ; and the anomaly is all
the greater in that the interests of the railway company
come, almost every year, into conflict with those of the
community at large, and the railway chairman is, on these
occasions, quite frankly there to promote his own company's
630 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
Bill, and to defend the interests of the shareholders by whom
he is paid. To say that the workmen's organisations shall
not pay their representatives in tlie way that suits working-
class conditions, whilst railway shareholders may pay their
representatives in the way that suits capitalist conditions —
to assume a great concern for the wounded conscience of a
Liberal or Conservative Trade Unionist who finds his Union
papng its Secretary or its President to sit as a Radical or
Labour Member of Parliament, and no concern at all for
the Sociahst or Radical shareholder in a railway company'
who finds his company paying its Conservative Chairman
M.P. — is to be guilty of an amazing degree of class bias, if
not of hypocrisy. After all, it is not the Trade Union but
the constituency that elects the Member of Parliament.
The Trade Union payment only enables him to stand.
Whatever may be thought of the policy of the Labour Party,
or the particular form of its organisation, if we regard the
Trade tjnion payment as a retaining fee for looking after
what the Trade Union members as a whole conceive to be
their own interest ; if the Trade Union members have the
opportunity of choosing, by a majority, which among
competing persons (or, for that matter, which among com-
peting groups of persons) they will entrust with this Trade
Union task ; if the Trade Union assumes no responsibility
for and exercises no coercion upon its Parliamentary repre-
sentative with regard to issues on which it has not voted,
no Trade Unionist's political conscience need be wounded
by the fact that, outside the range of the task that the
Trade Union has confided to him, the Union's Parliamentary
agent (who must have views of one sort or another) expresses
opinions in accord with those of the constituency that
elected him, or joins together with other members of like
opinions to form a political party. MTien, three-quarters of
a century ago, J. A. Roebuck was the salaried agent in the
House of Commons for the Legislative Assembly of Lower
Canada, no one complained that it was against the dignity
of Parliament for him to be thus retained and paid ; and
The Act of igi^ 631
so long as he attended faithfully to Canadian business it
was never contended that the tender conscience of any
Canadian Conservative was offended by the ultra-Radical
utterances or extremely independent poUtical alliances of
the Member for Bath.
The Trade Union Act of 1913
It is an instance of the failure of both the governing
class and the party poUticians to appreciate the workman's
standpoint, or to understand the temper of the Trade Union
world, that this crippling judgement remained for nearly four
years unreversed. The Liberal and Conservative Parties
were, during 1910 and 1911, quarrelling about the Budget
and the exact powers to be exercised by the House of Lords ;
and two successive General Elections were fought without
bringing the Trade Unions any redress. Meanwhile, up
and down the country discontented or venal Trade Unionists
were sought out by solicitors and others acting for the
employers ; and were induced to lend their names to pro-
ceedings for injunctions against their own Unions, prohibit-
ing them from subscribing to the Labour Party, from
contributing towards the election expenses of candidates,
from taking action in municipal elections, from subscribing
to educational classes, and from taking shares in a " Labour "
newspaper. It may have seemed a skilful political dodge,
during the elections of 1910, to hamstring in this way the
growing Labour Party j but the resentment caused by such
behaviour makes it doubtful whether action of this kind is,
in the long run, politically advantageous. In the first place,
the House of Commons, in 191 1, felt itself compelled, as an
alternative to restoring Trade Union hberties, to concede
the payment of £400 a year to all Members of Parliament,
Finally, in 1913, the Cabinet, after a severe internal struggle,
brought itself to introduce a Bill giving power generally to
any Trade Union to include in its constitution any lawful
purpose whatever, so long as its principal objects were those
632 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
of a Trade Union as defined in the 1876 Act ; and to spend
money on any purpose thus authorised. It was, indeed,
provided that before the financing of certain specified
pohtical objects could be undertaken, inchiding the support
of Parhamcntary or Municipal candidates or members, or
the publication or distribution of political documents, ^ a
ballot of the members was to be held in a prescribed form,
and a simple majority of those voting secured ; the payments
were to be made out of a special political fund, and any
member was to be entitled to claim to be exempt from tlie
special subscription to that political fund. These restrictive
provisions were opposed by the Labour Members in the
House of Commons ; but with slight amendment the
measure was passed into law as the Trade Union Act of 1913.^
It is not easy to sum up the whole effect of the legal
assaults upon Trade Unionism between 1901 and 1913.
Politically, the result was to exasperate the active-minded
workmen, and greatly to promote, though with some delay,
the growth of an independent Labour Party in the House of
Commons. On the other hand, it must not be overlooked
that the temporary crippling of Trade Unionism seemed to
be of financial advantage to that generation of employers.
It was, perhaps, not altogether an accident that the bnmt
of the attack had to be borne by the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, a Union then struggling for " recogni-
tion " in such a position as to make effective its claims to
better remuneration and shorter hours of labour for the
whole body of railwaymen. It may fairly be reckoned that
the railwaymen were, by means of the two great pieces of
litigation to which their L^nion was subjected, held at bay
for something like a decade, during which the improvement
in their conditions, in spite of a slowly-increasing cost of
living, was (mainly through tlic evasions of the railway
• If the main object of a ncwspajwr is political, any expenditure bv
a Trade Union upon it (including the purchase of shares) is itself political
(Bennett v. National Amalgamated Society of Operative Painters (1915),
31 T.L.R. 203).
* 3 George V. c. 30.
Costs of Litigation 633
companies by their silent " regrading " of their staffs)
extremely small. ^ A rise of wages to the extent of only
a penny per hour for the whole body of railwaymen would
have cost the railway companies, in the aggregate, some-
thing like five or six million pounds a year. If any such
advance was, by means of the Taff Vale Case and the
Osborne Judgement, staved off for ten years, the gain to the
whole body of railway shareholders of that generation might
be put as high as fifty or sixty miUions sterling — a sum worth
taking a little trouble about and spending a little money
upon, in items not revealed in the published accounts. But
the crippling effect of the litigation was not confined to the
Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which spent,
altogether, nearly ^^50,000 in law costs in defending the pass
for the whole Trade Union Movement. If, in the temporary
set-back to trade in 1903-5, and in the revival that
immediately followed it ; or in the recurring set-back of
1908-9, and the great improvement of the ensuing years,
the whole bod}/ of wage-earners in the kingdom lost only
a penny per hour from their wages, or gained less than they
might otherwise have done to the extent of no more than
a penny per hour, their financial loss, in one year alone,
would have amounted to something like a hundred million
pounds. And whatever they forwent in this way, they
lost not during one year only, but during at least several
years, and many of them for a whole decade. There is no
doubt that the capitalist employers, thinking only of their
profits for the time being, regarded even a temporary
crippling of the Trade Union Movement as well worth all
that it might cost them. The historian-, thinking more of
the secular effort upon social institutions, will not find the
balance-sheet so easy to construct. The final result of the
successive attempts between 1901 and 1913 to cripple Trade
Unionism by legal proceedings was to give it the firmest
^ " The average weekly earnings of railway servants, as given by the
Board of Trade, were lower in 1910 than in 1907 " {Trade Unionism on
the Railways, by G. D. H. Cole and R. Page Arnot, 1917, pp. 21-22).
634 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
possible basis in statute law. The right of workmen " to
combine for any purpose not in itself unlawful was definitely
established. The strike, with its " restraint of trade," and
its interference with profits and business ; peaceful picket-
ing even on an extensive scale ; the persuasion of workmen
to withdraw from employment even in breach of contract,
and the other frequent incidents of an industrial dispute
were specifically declared to be, not only not criminal, but
actually lawful. The right of Trade Unions to undertake
whatever political and other activities their members might
desire was expressly conceded. Finally, a complete im-
munity of Trade Unions in their corporate capacity from
being sued or made answerable in damages, for any act
whatsoever, however great might be the damage thereby
caused to other parties, was established by statute in the
most absolute form.^ The Trade Unions, it must be remem-
bered, had not asked for these sweeping changes in their
position. They had been, in 1900, content with the legisla-
tion of 1871-76. It was the successive assaults made upon
them by the legal proceedings of 1901-13 that eventually
drove the Government and Parliament, rather than formally
concede to Trade Unionism its proper position in the govern-
ment of industry, and effect the necessary fundamental
amendment of the law, once more to create for the work-
men's organisations an anomalous status.
The Rise in Status of Trade Unionism
So far we have described only the changes in the legal
status of the Trade Unions and the consequent increase in
their freedom of action and in their influence, alike in the
industrial and political sphere. This advance in legal status
* The Legal Position of Trade Unions, by H. H. Slcsser and W. Smilii
Clark, 2nd ed., 1914 ; The Present Law of Tradt Disputes and Traffr
Unions, by Professor W. M. Geldart, 1914 : Evtwicklung des Koa/jsanmic-
rechts in England, by G. Krojanker, 1914 ; An Inlroductton to Tr,t .>
Union Law, by H. H. Slesscr, 1919 ; The Law oj Trade Unions, by 11.
H. Slcsser and C. Baker (to be published in 1920).
The Rise in Status 635
has been accompanied by a still more revolutionary trans-
formation of the social and pohtical standing of the official
representatives of the Trade Union world — a transformation
which has been immensely accelerated by the Great War.
We may, in fact, not unfairly say that Trade Unionism has,
in 1920, won its recognition by Parhament and the Govem-
m.ent, by law and by custom, as a separate element in the
community, entitled to distinct recognition as part of the
social machinery of the State, its members being thus allowed
to give — like the clerg}^ in Convocation — not only their votes
as citizens, but also their concurrence as an order or estate.
Like all revolutionary changes in the British constitu-
tion, the recognition of the Trade Union Movement as part
of the governmental structure of the nation began in an
almost imperceptible way. Though Trade Union leaders
had been, since 1869, appointed occasionally and sparsely
on Royal Commissions and Departmental Committees, it
was possible, as recently as 1903, for a Government to set
up a Royal Commission on Trade Disputes and Trade
Combinations without a single Trade Unionist member.
Such a thing has not been repeated. It is now taken for
granted that Trade Unionism must be distinctively and
effectually represented, usually by men or women of its
own informal nomination, on all Royal Commissions and
Departmental Committees, whether or not these inquiries
are concerned specifically with " Labour Questions " — ex-
cepting only such as are so exclusively financial or profes-
sional that the representatives of Labour do not seek or
desire representation upon them.
In 1885-86, and again in 1892-95, Liberal Prime Ministers
had appointed leading Trade Unionists (who were, it must
be noted, also Liberal M.P.'s) to subordinate Ministerial
positions, where they were permitted practically no in-
fluence.^ In 1905 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman startled
1 Henry Broadhurst (Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons) was
Under Secretary of State for the Home Department (18S5-86) ; and
Thomas Burt (Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident Society) Parlia-
mentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (1892-95).
636 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
some of his Whig associates by asking Mr. John Burns —
who had presided over the Trades Union Congress as a
representative of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
but who had sat in Parhament since 1892 as a Liberal
supporter — to join his Cabinet as President of the Local
Government Board. This recognition of Labour in the
inner councils of the Government was quickly followed by
an exphcit recognition of the Trade Unions as part of the
machinery of State administration. In 191 1, when the vast
scheme of National Insurance was brought forward b}'' Mr.
Asquith's Government, and Parhament sanctioned the rais-
ing and expenditure of more than twenty million pounds a
year for the relief of sickness and unemployment, the Trade
Unions, equally with the universally praised Friendly
Societies, were made the agents for the administration of
the sickness, invalidity, and maternity benefits, and, parallel
with the Government's own local organisation, and to the
exclusion of the Friendly Societies, also for the administra-
tion of the State Unemployment Benefit to their own
members. But it was during the Great War that we watch
the most extensive advance in the status, ahke of the
official representatives of the Trade Unions and of the
Trade Unions themselves, as organs of representation and
government. It is needless to say that this recognition was
not accorded to the Trade Union world without a quid pro
quo from the Trade Union Movement to the Government.
Hence the part played by the Trade Unions in the national
effort, and its effect on their influence and status, demands
explicit notice.
British Trade Unionism and the War
Though theoretically internationalist in sympathy, and
predominantly opposed to " militarism " at home as well as
abroad, British Trade Unionism, when war was declared,
took a decided hne.^ From first to last the whole strength
1 For the facts as to Trade Unionism during the war, the most con
Effects of the War 637
of the Movement — in spite of the pacifist faith of a relatively
small minority, which included the most fervent and eloquent
of tlie Labour members and was supported by the energetic
propaganda of the fraction of the Trade Unionists who
were also members of the Socialist Society known as the
I.L.P. — was thrown on the side of the nation's effort. From
every industry workmen flocked to the colours, with the
utmost encouragement and assistance from their Trade
Unions ; until the miners, the railwa^Tnen, and the en-
gineers, in particular, had to be refused as recruits, exempted
from conscription, and even returned from the army, in
order that the indispensable industrial services might be
maintained. The number of workers in engineering and the
manufacture of munitions of war had, indeed, to be largely
increased ; and the Government found itself, within a year,
under the necessity of asking the Trade Unions for the
unprecedented sacrifice of the relinquishment, for the dura-
tion of the war, of the entire network of " Trade Union
Conditions " which had been slowly built up by generations
of effort for the protection of the workmen's Standard of
Life. This enormous draft on the patriotism of the rank
and file could only be secured by enhsting the support of
the official representatives of the Trade Union world — by
according to them a unique and unprecedented place as
the diplomatic representatives of the wage-earning class.
In the famous Treasury Conference of February 1915 the
capitaUst employers were ignored, and the principal Ministers
venient source is the Labour Year Book for igi6 and 1919 ; see also Labour
in War Time, by G. D. H. Cole, 1915, and Self-Government in Industry, by
the same, 1917 ; the large number of Government pubUcations issued
by the Local Government Board, the Board of Trade, the Ministry of
Labour, and especially the Ministry of Munitions, together with the
awards of the Committee on Production, most of which are briefly noticed
in the monthly Labour Gazette ; the monthly Circular (since 19 17) of the
Labour Research Department ; the unpubUshed monthly journal of the
Ministry of Munitions ; Reports of the Trades Union Congress, 1915-19,
and of the Labour Party Conferences, 191 4-1 9 ; pubhcations of the War
Emergency Workers' National Committee ; The Restoration of Trade Union
Conditions, by Sidney Webb, 191 6 ; Women in the Engineering Trades, by
Barbara Drake, 191 7.
638 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
of the Crown negotiated directly with the authorised repre-
sentatives of the whole Trade Union world, not only in
respect of the terms of service of Government employees,
but also with regard to the conditions of employment of all
persons, men and women, skilled and unskilled, unionists
and non-unionists, engaged on any work needed for the
conduct of the war — a phrase which was afterwards stretched
to include four-fifths of the entire manual-working class.
The Trade Union Executives agreed, at this Conference or
subsequently, to suspend, for the duration of the war, all
their rules and customary practices restrictive of the output
of anything required by the Government for the conduct of
the war ; all limitation of employment to apprenticed men,
to Trade Unionists, to men of proved technical skill, to
adults and even to the male sex ; all reservation of particular
jobs or particular machines to workers of particular trades ;
all definition of a Normal Day, and all objection to overtime,
night-work, or Sunday duty ; and even many of the Factory
Act prohibitions by which the health and even the safety of
the operatives had been protected. In order that the utmost
possible output of munitions of every kind might be secured,
elaborate schemes of " dilution " were assented to, under
which the various tasks were subdivided and rearranged, a
very large amount of automatic machinery was introduced,
and successive drafts of " dilutees " were brought into the
factories and workshops — men and boys from other occupa-
tions, sometimes even non-manual workers, as well as
women and girls — and put to work under the tuition and
direction of the minority of skilled craftsmen at top speed,
at time wages differing entirely from the Trade Union
rates, or at piecework prices unsafeguarded b}^ Collective
Bargaining, for hours of labour indefinitely lengthened, some-
times under conditions such as no Trade Union would have
permitted. It must be recorded to the credit of the Trade
Unions that not one of the societies refused this sacrifice,
which was made without any demand for compensatory
increase of pay, merely upon tlie condition — to which not
War Measures 639
only the Ministty, but also the Opposition Leaders and the
House of Commons as a whole, elaborately and repeatedly
pledged themselves — that the abandonment of the " Trade
Union Conditions " was only to be for the duration of the
war, and exclusively for the service, of the Government, not
to the profit of any private employer ; and that everything
that was abrogated was to be reinstated when peace came.
Under stress of the national emergency, the Govern-
ment made ever greater demands on the patriotism of the
Trade Unions, which accepted successively, so far as war-
work was concerned, a legal abrogation of the employers'
competition for their members' services by the prohibition
of advertisement for employees, and of the engagement of
men from other districts — an unprecedented interference
with the " Law of Supply and Demand " — the suspension
of the right to strike for better terms ; the submission of all
disputes to the decision of a Government Department of
arbitration, the awards of which, with the abrogation of the
right to strike, or even freely to relinquish emplo^^ment,
became virtually compulsory ; the legal enforcement
under penalties of the employer's workshop rules ; and even
legally enforced continuance, not only in munition work,
but actually in the service of a particular employer, under
the penal jurisdiction of the ubiquitous Munitions Tribunals.
The Munitions of War Acts, 1915, 1916 and 1917, by which
all this industrial coercion was statutorily imposed, were
accepted by overwhelming majorities at successive Trade
Union and Labour Party Conferences. It was a serious
aggravation of this " involuntary servitude " that the rigid
enforcement of compulsory military service — extended suc-
cessively from single men to fathers of families, from 18 years
of age to 51 — had the incidental effect of enforcing what
was virtually " industrial conscription " on those who were
left for the indispensable civilian employment ; and the
individual workman realised that the penalty for any failure
of implicit obedience to the foreman might be instant
relegation to the trenches. ' Although this inevitable result
640 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
of Compulsory Military Service was foreseen and deplored/
the successive Military Service Acts were — in view of the
nation's needs — ratified, in effect, by great majorities at the
workmen's National Congresses. The strongest protests
were made, but as each measure was passed it was accepted
without resistance, and proposals to resist were always
rejected by large majorities. It speaks volumes, both for
the patriotism of the Trade Unionists and for the strength
of Trade Union lo3''alty and Trade Union organisation, that
under such repressive circumstances the Trade Union leaders
were able, on the whole, to prevent their members from
hindering production by industrial revolts. A certain
amount of friction was, of course, not to be avoided. Strikes,
though greatly reduced in number, were not wholly pre-
vented ; and the South Wales coal-miners and the engineering
workmen on the Clyde — largely through arbitrary and
repressive action by their respective employers — broke
into open rebellion ; which led, in the one industry, to
the Government overriding the recalcitrant South Wales
employers and assuming the direction and the financial
responsibihty of all the coal mines throughout the kingdom ;
and, in the other, to the arbitrary arrest and deportation
of the leaders of the unofficial organisation of revolt styled
the " Clyde Workers' Committee." The Trade Union
Executives and officials, whilst restraining their members
and deprecating all stoppages of production, were able
to put up a good fight against the unnecessary and un-
reasonable demands which, with a view to " after the
war" conditions, employers were not unwilhng to use the
national emergency to put forward. These Trade Union
spokesmen had to obtain for their members the successive
rises in money wages which the steadily rising cost of living
made necessary, and they had constantly to stand their
1 Compulsory Mthiary Service and Industrial Conscription : what
they mean to the Workers (War Emergency Workers' National Committee,
191 5) ; Memorandum on Industrial and Civil Liberties (Woolwich Joint
Committee on Problems arising from the War).
The Broken Pledges 641
ground in the innumerable mixed committees and arbitra-
tion proceedings into which the Government was always
inveigling them. On the whole, whilst co-operating in every
way in meeting the national emergency, the Trade Union
organisation during the four and a-quarter years of war
remained intact ; and Trade Union membership — allowing
for the miUions absent with the colours — steadily increased.
Nor did the Trade Union Movement make any serious
revolt when the Government found itself unable to fulfil,
with any literal exactness, the specific pledges which it had
given to Organised Labour. The complications and diffi-
culties of the Government were, in fact, so great that the
pledges were not kept. The first promise to be broken was
that the abrogation of Trade Union Conditions and the
removal of everything restrictive of output should not be
allowed to increase the profits of the employers. The so-
called " Munitions Levy " was imposed in 19 16 on " con-
trolled establishments," in fulfilment of this pledge, in order
to confiscate for the Exchequer the whole of their excess
profit, over and above a permitted addition of 20 per cent
and very Hberal allowances for increased capital and extra
exertion by the employers themselves. It will hardly be
beUeved that, in flagrant disregard of the specific pledge,
within a year this Munitions Levy was abolished ; and
the firms especially benefiting by the workmen's sacrifices
were made merely subject, in common with all other trades
where there had been no such abrogation of Trade Union
Conditions, to the 80 per cent Excess Profits Duty, with
the result of increasing the net income left to those em-
ployers whose profits had doubled, and of doing, with
regard to all the employers, the very thing that the Trade
Unions had stipulated should not be done, namely, giving
the employers themselves a financial interest in " dilution." ^
As the war dragged on, and prices rose, the successive
^ The Government seems to have hoodwinked the pubhc into beheving
that 80 per cent of all the excess profits was the same thing as loo per cent
of the profits in excess of 20 per cent addition to the pre-war profits.
Y
642 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
war-bonuses and additions to wages — especially those of
the miners and the bulk of the women workers — in many
cases fell steadily behind the rise in the cost of living ; and
in 1917 the War Cabinet was actually guilty of a formal
instruction to the presumedly impartial central arbitra-
tion tribunal that no further increase of wages was to
be awarded — an instruction which, on its public disclosure,
had to be apologised for and virtually withdrawn. Even
the pledge as to wages in the solemn " Treasury Agree-
ment " of 19 15, at which the " Trade Union Conditions "
were surrendered, was not fulfilled, at any rate as regards
the women workers ; and had to be made the subject
of a subsequent serious investigation by the War Cabinet
Committee on Women in Industry, in which all the " white-
washing " of a Government majority failed to convince the
Trade Unionists, any more than it did the only unpaid
member of the Committee, that the Government officials
had not betrayed them.^ The solemnly promised " Restora-
tion of Trade Union Conditions " was only imperfectly
carried out. What the Government did, and that only
after long delay, was not what it had promised, namely,
actually to see the pre-war conditions and practices re-
instated, but to enact a statute enabling the workmen to
proceed in the law courts against employers who failed to
restore them ; continuance of any such restoration to be
obligatory only for one year.^
^ Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, Cmd. 135,
1919. The Minority Report by Mrs. Sidney Webb was republished by
the Fabian Society, under the title of Men's and Women's Wages : Should
they be equal ?, 1919.
* Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act, 1919 (9 and 10 George V. c. 42).
During the first year after the cessation of hostilities the problem of restora-
tion did not assume so acute a form as had been expected. A large part
of the new automatic machinery which had been introduced in 191 5-18
was found to have been greatly deteriorated by excessive working and
had to be scrapped ; there was an immediate demand for ordinary en-
gineering work of the old type ; and the British employers did not, in
fact, set themselves at once to apply " mass production " to the making
of steam engines and motor cars, agricultural implements and machinery
generally, nor make any dramatic advances in its application to the
production of sewing-machines, bicycles, and electrical apparatus. During
Trade Union Conditions 643
The Trade Unionists, in fact, who had at the outset of
the war patriotically refrained from bargaining as to the
1919 the extensive readaptation of the machine-shops, and the great
demand for new tools (especially machine-tools) facihtated the absorption,
often in new situations, of all the skilled engineers. There was, accord-
ingly, httle difiSculty in finding employment at good wages for practically
all the skilled workmen, and (except for temporary dislocations arising in
consequence of the disputes in coalmining, ironfounding, and other trades)
the percentage of members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and
other Unions of skilled craftsmen remained throughout the year at a
minimum. The great bulk of the " dilutees," including substantially all
the women, received their discharge on the cessation of their jobs of
" repetition work " on munitions of war, the employers preferring, in face
of the immediate demand, to avoid trouble, to revert to the old methods
and to get back their former staffs, rather than engage in the hazardous
enterprise of reorganising their factory methods. Hence, taking the
engineering industry as a whole, the men got back the work from the
women ; though not without some attempts at resistance by individual
employers, which were not persisted in ; and not without leaving the
total number of women employed in 1920 in what might be deemed their
own branches of the engineering industry apparently double that of 191 3.
Many of the male " dilutees " on discharge also reverted" to other employ-
ment, but some proportion of them, who had acquired skill, and were
members of various Unions admitting semi-skilled workers, found employ-
ment in engineering shops on particular machines or in particular jobs.
There has apparently been a continuous increase in the proportion of
machines demanding less than full skill (such as milling machines and
small turret lathes), and therefore of " semi-skilled " men in employment,
without (owing to the expansion of the industry as a whole) any reduction
in the number of skilled men. In face of the great demand for output,
and of the fact that hardly any members of the skilled Unions were un-
employed, this fact did not evoke objection. The position as regards
the Premium Bonus System or other form of " Payment by Results "
was left unchanged. Few, if any, legal proceedings were actually taken
against employers in the Munitions Courts under the Restoration of
Pre-War Practices Act. The employers and the Government were,
during the first half of the year, in a state of alarm lest there should be a
Labour uprising, which would seriously interfere with the resumption of
business ; and great care was exercised to avoid any disputes. Successive
advances of wages were awarded to meet the rising cost of Uving, and
all rates were " stabilised " by law, so as to prevent any employer from
effecting a reduction, first until May 20, 1919, then until November 20,
1919, and finally until September 30, 1920 ; a new " Industrial Court "
being set up by statute (Industrial Courts Act 191 9) empowered to give
non-obhgatory decisions in any disputes that might be voluntarily referred
to it — a measure from which the Parhamentary Labour Party succeeded
in ehminating every imphcation of Compulsory Arbitration, Obhgatory
Awards, or the Abrogation of the Right to Strike. But the difi&culties are
not yet surmounted ; and when there comes a slump in business, and
skilled engineers find themselves unemployed, the Government pledge
will be heard of again.
644 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
price of their aid, were, on the whole, " done " at its close.
Though here and there particular sections had received
exceptionally high earnings in the time of stress, the rates
of wages, taking industry as a whole, did not, as the Govern-
ment returns prove, rise either so quickly or so high as the
cost of living ; so that, whilst many persons suffered great
hardship, the great majority of wage-earners found the
product in commodities of their rates of pay in 1919 less
rather than more than it was in 1913. During the war,
indeed, many thousands of households got in the aggregate
more, and both earned and needed more ; because the
young and the aged were at work and costing more than
when not at work, whilst overtime and night-work increased
the strain and the requirements of all. When peace came,
it was found that the Government, for all its promises, had
made no arrangements whatever to prevent unemployment ;
and none to relieve the unemployed beyond an entirely
improvised and dwindling weekly dole, which (so far as
civilians were concerned) was suddenly brought to an end
on November 20, 1919, without any alternative provision
being immediately made.
It would thus be easy to argue that the representatives
of the Trade Union world made a series of bad bargains
with the Government, and through the Government with
the capitalist employers, at a time when the nation's needs
would have enabled the organised manual workers almost
to dictate their own terms. But this is to take a short-
sighted view. It is a sufficient answer to say that the
great mass of the Trade Unionists, like the leaders them-
selves, wanted above all things that the nation should win
the war ; found it repugnant to make stipulations in the
national emergency, and did not realise the extent to which
they were being tricked and cheated by the officials. But
apart from this impulsive and unself-regarding patriotism
we think that, when it becomes possible to cast up and
balance all the results of the innovations of the war period,
the Trade Union Movement will be found to have gained
The Fillip to Trade Unionism 645
and not lost. We may suggest, perhaps paradoxically,
that the very ease with which the War Cabinet suppressed
the civil liberties of the manual-working wage-earners
during the war^ and even continued after the Armistice a
machinery of industrial espionage, with agents provocateurs
of workshop " sedition," enormously increased the soUdarity
of the Trade Union Movement — an effect intensified during
1919 by the costly and futile intervention of the British
Government in Russia on behalf of mihtary leaders whom
the Trade Unionists, rightl}'^ or wrongly, believed to be
organising the forces of pohtical and economic reaction.
Sober and responsible Trade Unionists, who had taken for
granted the easy-going freedom and tolerance characteristic
of EngUsh hfe in times of peace, suddenly reaUsed that
these conditions could at any moment be withdrawn from
them by what seemed the arbitrary fiat of a Government
over which they found that they had no control. In this
way the abrogation of Trade Union liberty during the war
gave the same sort of intellectual fillip to Trade Unionism
and the Labour Party in 1915-19 that had been given in
1 901-13 by the Taff Vale Case and the Osborne Judgement.
At the same time the Government found itself compelled,
in order to secure the co-operation of the Trade Unions,
both during the war and amid the menacing economic
conditions of the first half of 1919, to accord to them, and
• to their leaders, a locus standi in the determination of
essentially national issues that was undreamt of in previous
times. The Trade Unions, in fact, through shouldering
their responsibihty in the national cause, gained enormously
in social and political status. In practically every branch
of pubhc administration, from unimportant local committees
up to the Cabinet itself, we find the Trade Union world now
accepted as forming, virtually, a separate constituency,
which has to be specially represented. We shall tell the
tale in our next chapter of the participation of members of
the Parhamentary Labour Party in the Coalition Govern-
ments of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. What is here
646 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
relevant is that these Trade Union officials were selected
in the main, not on personal grounds, but because they
represented the Trade Union Movement. They accepted
ministerial office with the approval, and they relinquished
ministerial office at the request of the National Conference
of the Labour Party, in which ihe Trade Unions exercised
the predominant influence. A similar recognition of the
Trade Union Movement has rnarked all the recently con-
stituted Local Government structure, from the committees
set up in 1914 for the relief of distress to those organised in
1917 for the rationing and control of the food supply, and
the tribunals formed in 1919 for the suppression of " profit-
eering." In all these cases the Government specifically
required the appointment of representatives of the local
Trade Unions. Trade Unionists have to constitute half
the members appointed to the Advisory Committees attached
to the Emploj-Tnent Exchanges ; and Trade Unionist
workmen sit, not only on the temporary " Munitions
Courts " administering the disciplinary provisions of the
Munitions of War Acts, but also on the local Tribunals of
Appeal to determine whether a workman is entitled to the
State Unemployment Benefit. In the administration of
the Military and Naval Pensions Act of 1916 a further step
in recognition of Trade Unionism was taken. Not only
were the nominees of Labour placed upon the Statutory
(Central) Pensions Committee, but, in the order constituting
the Local Pensions Committees, the Trade Union organisa-
tions in each locality, which were named in the schemes,
were expressl}^ and specifically accorded the right to elect
whom they chose as their representatives on these committees
by which the pensions were to be awarded.^ When, towards
the close of the war, the Committee presided over by the
Rt. Hon. J. H. Whitley, M.P., propounded its scheme of
Joint Industrial Councils of equal numbers of representative
employers and workers for the supervision and eventual
1 See this noted in the report of the Parliamentary Committee in the
Annual Report of the Trades Union Congress, 191 7.
The Whitley Councils 647
administration of many matters of interest in each industry
throughout the kingdom — the " mouse " which was practi-
cally the whole outcome as regards industrial reorganisation
of the Ministry of Reconstruction — it was specifically to the
Trade Unions in each industry, and to them alone, that the
election of the wage-earners' representatives was entrusted. ^
1 The " Whitley Report," published early in 191 7, ■'.vhen possibiUties
of industrial and social " reconstruction " were much discussed, made a
great stir, which was increased by the definite endorsement of its recom-
mendations by the Government, and its energetic promotion of their adop-
tion throughout British industry. Whilst significantly abstaining from
any suggestion of " profit-sharing, copartnership, or particular systems of
wages," the Report emphasised the importance of (a) " adequate organ-
isation on the part of both employers and employed " ; {b) the imperative
need for a greater opportunity of participating in the discussion about and
adjustment of " those parts of industry by which they are most affected "
of the v.ork-people in each occupation ; (c) the subordination of any
decisions to those of the Trade Unions and Employers' Associations.
Among the subjects to be dealt with by the hierarchy of National, District,
and Works Councils or Committees were : (i.) " the better utilisation of the
practical knowledge and experience of the work-people . . . and for
securing to them a greater share in and responsibiUty for the determina-
tion and obser%'ance of the conditions under which their work is carried
on " ; (ii.) " the settlement of the general principles governing the con-
ditions of employment . . . having regard to the need for securing to
the work-people a share in the increased prosperity of the industry " ;
(iii.) the methods to be adopted for negotiations, adjusting wages, deter-
mining differences and " ensuring to the work-people the greatest possible
security of earnings and employment " ; (iv.) technical education, in-
dustrial research, utihsation of inventions, and improvement of processes ;
(v.) proposed legislation affecting the industrj'. After two years' propa-
gandist effort, it seems (1920) as if the principal industries, such as agri-
culture, transport, mining, cotton, engineering, or shipbuilding are unUkely
to adopt the scheme ; but two or three score trades have equipped them-
selves either with " WTiitley Councils " — the District Councils and Works
Committees are much more slow to form — or with " Interim Industrial
Reconstruction Committees," which may be regarded as pro\'isional
Councils, in such industries as pottery, house-building, woollen manu-
facture, hosiery, heavy chemicals, furniture-making, bread-baking, match-
making, metallic bedstead manufacturing, saw-milhng, and vehicle building.
The Government found itself constrained, after an obstinate resistance
by the heads of near!}' all the departments, to institute the Councils
throughout the pubUc service. We venture on the prediction that some
such scheme will commend itself in all nationalised or municipalised indus-
tries and services, including such as may be effectively " controlled " by
the Government, though remaining nominally the property of the private
capitaUst — possibly also in the Co-operative Movement ; but that it is
not Ukely to find favour either in the well-organised industries (for which
alone it was devised) or in those in which there are Trade Boards legally
648 l^he Place of Trade Unionism in the State
When, in 1919, it seemed desirable to make a series of com-
prehensive reforms in the terms of employment, it was not
to Parliament that the Prime Minister turned, but to a
" National Industrial Conference," to which he summoned
some five hundred representatives of the Employers* Associa-
tions and Trade Unions. It was by this body, through its
own sub-committee of thirty employers' representatives
and thirty Trade Union representatives, that were elaborated
the measures instituting a Legal Maximum Eight Hours
Day and a statutory Minimum Wage Commission that the
Ministry undertook to present to Parliament. In the
Royal Commission on Agriculture of 1919, the several
Unions enrolling farm labourers were invited to nominate
as many members (eight) as were accorded to the farmers,
whilst of the four remaining members appointed as scientific
or statistical experts — all landlords being excluded — two
were chosen among those known to be sympathetic to
Labour. In the statutory Coal Industry Commission of
the same year, to which reference has akeady been made,
the Miners' Federation made its participation absolutely
conditional on being allowed to nominate half of the total
membership, under a presumedly impartial Judge of the
High Court, including not merely three Trade Union officials
to balance the three mine-owners, but also three out of the
six " disinterested " members by whom — all royalty owners
being excluded — the Commission was to be completed.
determining wages, etc. ; or, indeed, permanently in any others conducted
under the system of capitahst profit-making. See the series of " Whitley
Reports," Cd. 8606, 9001, 9002, 9085, 9099, and 9153 ; the Industrial
Reports, Nos. i to 4, of the Ministry of Reconstruction ; the able and
well-informed article, " La politique de paix sociale en Angleterre," by
^Ue Halevy, in Revue d'Econotnie Politique, No. 4 of 1919 ; Recovimenda-
tion on the Whitley Report put forward by the Federation of British Industries,
1917; National Guilds or Whitley Councils? (National Guilds League),
1 91 8. For the " Builders' Parliament," in many ways the most interesting
of these Councils, though as yet achieving only schemes in which the
employers, as a whole, do not concur, see A Memorandum on Industrial
Self -Government, by Malcolm Sparkes ; Masters and Men, a new Co-
partnership, by Thomas Foster ; and The Industrial Council for the Building
Industry, by the Garton Foundation, 1919.
The New Ideas 649
All this constitutional development is at once the recogni-
tion and the result of the new position in the State that
Trade Unionism has won — a position due not merely to
the numerical growth that we have described, but also to
the uprise of new ideas and wider aspirations in the Trade
Union world itself.
The Revolution in Thought
The new ideas which are to-day taking root in the Trade
Union world centre round the aspiration of the organisations
of manual workers to take part — some would urge the pre-
dominant part, a few might say the sole part — in the control
and direction of the industries in which they gain their
livehhood. Such a claim was made, as we have described
in the third chapter of this work, in its most extreme form,
by the revolutionary Trade Unionism of 1830-34 ; and it
lingered on in the minds of the Chartists as long as any of
them survived. But after the collapse, in 1848, of Chartism
as an organised movement British Trade Unionism settled
down to the attainment of a strictly Umited end — the main-
tenance and progressive improvement, within each separate
occupation or craft, of the terms of the bargain made by
the wage-earner with the employers, including alike all the
conditions of service and complete freedom from personal
oppression. Hence the Trade Unionist as such, during the
second half of the nineteenth century, tacitly accepted the
existing organisation of industry. He discussed the rival
advantages of private enterprise carried on in the interests
of the capitahst profit-maker on the one hand, and of the
Consumers' Co-operative Movement or State and Municipal
enterprise on the other, almost exclusively from the stand-
point of whether the profit-making employers or the repre-
sentatives of the consumers or the citizens offered better
conditions of employment to the members of his own
organisation. Right down to the end of the nineteenth
century this remained the dominant working-class view.
Y2
650 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
We find in the proceedings of the Royal Commission on
Labour, 1891-94, a striking demonstration of the strictly
limited purpose of British Trade Unionism at that date.
Whether we study the elaborate collection of Trade Union
rules and other documents made by the Commission, or the
personal evidence given by the leaders or advocates of
Trade Unionism, we find from beginning to end absolutely
no claim, and even no suggestion, that the Trade Union
should participate in the direction of industry, otherwise
than in arranging with the employers the conditions of the
wage-earner's working life.^ One or two Unions included,
among their published " objects," vague and pious references
to the desirability of co-operative production ; but the
assumption was always that any such co-operative produc-
^ It must be remembered that the conditions of the manual worker's
Ufe dealt with by the Trade Unions up to 1894 included a wide range of
material circumstances and moral considerations. Besides the mainten-
ance of standard rates and methods of remuneration, the reduction of the
normal day, and payment for overtime, we find among the objects of Trade
Unions, as reported to the Commission, the prevention of stoppages from
wages ; the maintenance of the apprenticeship system and the keeping
out of the trade all who are not qualified ; the abolition of the character
note ; the prevention of victimisation ; the provision of legal assistance
to members in respect of compensation for accidents ; the estabhshment
of an agency through which employers may obtain efficient men ; watch-
ing over the proceedings of local boards and law courts ; the enforcement
of the Factory Acts and other protective legislative enactments ; the
improvement of dietary scales and house and shop accommodation where
workers have to live in ; the collection and circulation of information on
trade matters ; the estabhshment of benefit funds for unemployment,
disputes, sickness, accidents and death ; the assistance of members
anxious to migrate or emigrate ; the establishment of " that reciprocal
confidence which is so essential between workmen and masters," and the
promotion of arbitration and conciliation ; the regulation of output ; the
promotion of friendly intercourse with workers of other countries ; the
assistance of other trades in times of difficulty ; and political action — the
support of Parliamentary and Municipal Labour candidates, of Trades
Councils, of the Trades Union Congress, and of Labour newspapers. Some
Unions decide to promote co-operative enterprise, " to secure the legal
recognition of the natural rights of labourers to the produce of their toil,"
whilst others promote the " moral, social, intellectual and professional
advancement " of the working class. " Trade Societies," state the rules
of the Associated Shipwrights, " must be maintained as the guard of
workmen against capitalists until some higher effort of productive co-
operation has been inaugurated which shall secure to workers 9, more
equitable share of the product of labour."
Socialisation 651
tion would be carried out by the members of the Union
working in and managing a particular establishment, which
would take its place, hke any private establishment, within
the framework of the capitahst S3^stem. When a Trade
Union leader was also a Socialist he assumed that the
" Socialisation " of industrv' would be carried out by the
Central or Local Government, or by the Consumers' Co-
operative Movement. Hence, Mr. Tom Mann, himself a
Royal Commissioner, who was called as a witness before the
Commission, was a powerful advocate of nationalisation and
municipalisation. " I am distinctly favourable, and am
associated with those who are earnestly advocating," he
stated from the \%dtness-chair, " the advisability of encourag-
ing the State to at once entertain the proposal of the State
control of railways. I am also identified with those who are
favourable to the nationahsation of the land, which means,
of course, a State control of land in the common interest ;
and I am continually advocating the desirability for states-
men and politicians and municipal councillors to try and
understand in what particular departments of industry they
can get to work and exercise their faculties in controlling
trade and industry in the common interest where that
interest would be likely to be secured better than under the
present method." When asked by the Duke of Devonshire
whether his advocacy of the nationahsation of the railways
was in the interests of the public or mainly in the interests
of the workmen employed on the railways, he replied :
" Not mainly on behalf of the workers ; I would put it
equally so. I believe it would serve the public interest,
the general well-being of the community. ... I do not
believe that a Government Department v;ill ever be healthy
until the public themselves are healthy in this direction, and
are keeping a watchful eye upon the whole governmental
show and seciire the general well-being by their watchfulness.
I do not think that State control of industry will ever be
brought about until that development on the part of the
public themselves is brought about, and they desire to see
652 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
it controlled in the common interest. . . . When a sufficient
number of men are prepared to take the initiative, and
educate public opinion to the desirability of a superior
method of control in the common interest, then I believe
it will be done, not all at once, but gradually." ^
But Mr. Tom Mann did not stand alone. The Inde-
pendent Labour Party, the largest and the most popular
of Socialist societies in the United Kingdom, estabUshed in
1893, and largely recruited from the ranks of Trade Unionists,
carried on, right down to the outbreak of the Great War, a
vigorous propaganda in favour of an indefinite extension
of State and Municipal administration of industrial under-
takings, whilst the more doctrinaire Social Democratic
Federation was, in its early days, outspokenly contemptuous
of the whole Trade Union Movement as a mere " palliative "
of the Capitalist system. This bias in favour of the com-
munal organisation, in favour of the government of the
people by and for the people organised in geographical
areas, was, until the opening of the twentieth century,
equally dominant among the most " advanced " Labour
and Socialist thinkers on the Continent of Europe. ^
^ Minutes of Evidence, Royal Commission on Labour: "Report of
Evidence from Co-operative Societies and Public Officials," 1893, C
7063 — I (Q 2098, 21 17 — 8).
Mr. Tom Mann was also in favour of the Consumers' Co-operative
Movement, and had in those days a distinct bias for legal enactment
over direct action in determining the conditions of employment. " I
should have said," he stated in the witness-chair, "that I, as a Trade
Unionist, am of opinion that in my capacity of citizen I have just as full
a right to use Parliament for the general betterment of the conditions of
the workers, of whom I am one, as I have to use the Trade Union ; and
when I could use the institution of Parliament to do that constructive
work that I sometimes use the Trade Union for, and could use Parliament
more effectively than I could the Trade Union, then I should favour the
use of Parliament, not necessarily in order to enforce men to do some-
thing which they might not wish to do, but because it was the more
effective instrument to use to bring about changed conditions " {Ibid.
Q 2531)-
2 An interesting sidelight is afforded by the reprobation by the German
Social Democratic Party, in 1894, of Eduard Bernstein for translating
our History of Trade Unionism, on the ground that Trade Unionism had
no place in the Socialist State, and that it was needless to trouble about it J
Co-operative Production 653
But in spite of the assumption that services and in-
dustries ought to be carried out by democracies of consumers
and citizens, organised in geographical districts — that is, by
the Central and Local Government of a Political Democracy
— there always remained, in the hearts of the manual work-
ing class in Great Britain, an instinctive faith in the opposite
idea of Associations of Producers owning, as such, both the
instruments and the product of their labour. Throughout
the whole of the second half of tlie nineteenth century it was
pathetic to see this faith struggling on, in spite of the almost
constant failure of the innumerable little manufacturing
establisliments carried on by Associations of Producers.
What finally killed it as an ideal, in the eyes of the Trade
Unionists of Great Britain, was the fact that Co-operative
Production and its child. Co-partnership, were taken up
by the most reactionary persons and parties in the State.
Great peers and Conservative statesmen were always blessing
" Co-operative Production," and always trying to stimulate
the workers to undertake business on their own account.
WTien the invariable failure of self-governing workshops
became too obvious, the advocates of Co-operative Produc-
tion fell back on " Labour Copartnership " — partnership in
business with the capitalist class ! This was so obviously,
and almost avowedly, an attack on, or at least a proposal
for the supersession of Trade Unionism, that it aroused the
fiercest opposition ; and the very idea became anathema
in the Trade Union world. In short, there was, from the
collapse of Owenism and Chartism in the eighteen-thirties
and -forties, right down to 1900, practically no sign that
the British Trade Unions ever thought of themselves other-
wise than as organisations to secure an ever-improving
Standard of Life by means of an ever-increasing control of
the conditions under which they worked. They neither
desired nor sought any participation in the management
of the technical processes of industry (except in so far as
these might affect the conditions of their employment, or
the selection of persons to be employed) ; whilst it never
654 The Place of Trade Unionism in the Stale
occurred to a Trade Union to claim any power over, or
responsibility for, buying the raw materials or marketing
the product. On the contrary, the most advanced Trade
Union leaders were never tired of asserting that their
members must enjoy the full standard conditions of employ-
ment, whatever arrangements the employers might make
with regard to the other factors of production ; or however
unskilful employers or groups of employers might prove to
be in the buying of the raw material, or in the selling of the
commodities in the markets of the world.
With the opening years of the twentieth century we
become aware of a new intellectual ferment, not confined to
any one country, nor even to the manual working class. We
watch, emerging in various forms, new variants of the old
idea of the organisation of industries and services by those
who are actually carrying them on. We see it working
among the brain-working professionals. Alike in England
and in France the teachers in the schools and the professors
in the colleges began to assert both their moral right to
manage the institutions as they alone know how, and the
advantage that this would be to the community. The
doctors were demanding a similar control over the exercise
of their own function. But the most conspicuous, and the
most widely influential, of the forms taken by the idea was
the revolutionary movement that spread among large
sections of the wage-earners almost simultaneously in France,
the classic home of associations of producers, and in the
United States, with its large population of foreign immi-
grants. In both these countries any widespread Trade
Unionism was of much more recent growth than in Great
Britain, and was still regarded, alike by the employers and
by the Government, as an undesirable and revolutionary
force. The " syndicats " of France, and the Labour Unions
among the foreign workers in the United States were, in fact,
at the opening of the twentieth century, in much the same
stage of development as the British Trade Unions were when
they were swept into the vortex of revolutionary Owenism
Syndicalism 655
in 1834. Alike in their constitutions and in their declared
objects, in the first decade of the new century, the General
Confederation of Labour in France and the Industrial
Workers of the World in the United States bear a striking
resemblance to the Grand National Consolidated Trades
Union that we have described in an earher chapter ; and,
Hke that organisation, both of them excited a quite ex-
aggerated terror in the hearts of magistrates and Ministers
of State. Indeed, the doctrines and phraseology of the mass
of literature turned out by French Trade Unionists between
1900 and 1910 are remarkably hke — allowing for the superior
literary power of the French — the pamphlets and leaflets
of the Owenite Trade Unionism. ^ There is the same con-
ception of a republic of industry, consisting of a federation
of Trade Unions, local and central ; the federation of shop
clubs, branches, or local unions forming the Local Authority
for all purposes, whilst a standing conference of the national
representatives of all the Trade Unions constitutes a co-
ordinating or superintending National Authority. There is
the same rehance, as a means of achievement, on continuous
strikes, culminating in a " general expropriatory strike."
There is the same denunciation of the political State as a
useless encumbrance, and the same appeal to the soldiers
to join the workers in upsetting the existing system.
We need not stay to inquire how this new ferment
crossed the Atlantic or the Channel. Between 1905 and
1910 we become aware of the birth, in some of the industrial
districts, of a number of new propagandist groups — more
especially among the miners and engineers — groups of
persons in revolt not only against the Capitahst System
but against the hmited aims of contemporary Trade Union-
ism and the usual categories of contemporary Socialism.
The pioneer of the new faith in the United Kingdom seems
to have been James ConnoUy, afterwards organiser of the
^ See, for convenient summaries, Syndicalism in France, by Louis
Levine, 1911, and What Syndicalism Means, by S. and B. Webb, 1912 ;
see also American Syndicalism, by J. Graham Brooks, 1913.
656 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
Irish Transport and General Workers Union, to which we
have already referred, a man of noble character and fine
intelligence, whose tragic execution in 1916, after the
suppression of the Dublin rising, made him one of the
martyred heroes of the Irish race. Connolly, who was a
disciple of the founder of the American Sociahst Labour
Party, Daniel De Leon, started a similar organisation on the
Clyde in 1905. In opposition to the contemporary Socialist
propaganda in favour of the nationalisation and municipal-
isation of industries and services, to be brought about by
poUtical action, he advocated the direct supersession of the
CapitaUst System in each workshop and in every industry,
by the organised workers thereof. " It is an axiom," he
said, " enforced by all the experience of the ages, that
they who rule industrially will rule politically. . . . That
natural law leads us as individuals to unite in our craft,
as crafts to unite in our industry, as industries in our class ;
and the finished expression of that evolution is, we beheve,
the appearance of our class upon the political battle-ground
with all the economic power behind it to enforce its mandates.
Until that day dawns our poHtical parties of the working
class are but propagandist agencies, John the Baptists of
the New Redemption ; but when that day dawns our
political party will be armed with all the might of our class ;
wiU be revolutionary in fact as well as in thought." " Let
us be clear," he adds, " as to the function of Industrial
Unionism. That function is to build up an industrial
repubUc inside the shell of the political State, in order that
when that industrial repubUc is fully organised it may
crack the shell of the political State and step into its place
in the scheme of the universe. . . . Under a Socialist form
of society the administration of affairs will be in the hands
of representatives of the various industries of the nation ;
. . . the workers in the shops and factories will organise
themselves into unions, each union comprising all the
workers at a given industry ; . . . said union will demo-
cratically control the workshop life of its own industry.
The Miners' Next Step 657
electing all foremen, etc., and regulating the routine of
labour in that industry in subordination to the needs of
society in general, to the needs of its allied trades and to
the department of industry to which it belongs. . . .
Representatives elected from these various departments of
industry will meet and form the industrial administration
or national government of the country. In short. Social
Democracy, as its name implies, is the application to in-
dustry, or to the social hfe of the nation, of the fundamental
principles of Democracy. Such appUcation will necessarily
have to begin in the workshop, and proceed logically and
consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial
organisation until it reaches the culminating point of
national executive power and direction. In other words,
SociaUsm must proceed from the bottom upwards, whereas
capitahst political society, is organised from above down-
ward ; Sociahsm wiU be administered by a committee of
experts elected from the industries and professions of the
land ; capitalist society is governed by representatives
elected from districts, and is based upon territorial division." ^
A similar ferment was to be seen at work amongst the
South Wales miners, . giving rise to a series of propagandist
organisations, preaching the doctrine of Industrial Unionism
as a revolutionary force, and culminating in the much-
denounced pamphlet The Miners' Next Step, 1912, which
created some sensation in the capitahst world, ^
In 1910 we find Mr. Tom Mann, fresh from organising
strikes in Australia, and inspired by a visit to Paris, preaching
the new faith to large popular audiences in London and the
principal provincial cities with the same sincerity and
eloquence with which he had formerly advocated State and
Municipal Sociahsm and the statutory regulation of the con-
ditions of employment. " The Industrial Syndicahst," he
explains, holds that " to run industry through Parhament,
that is by State machinery, will be even more mischievous
^ Socialism made Easy, by James Connolly, 1905, pp. 13, 16-17.
* The Miners' Next Step, 1912.
658 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
to the working class than the existing method, for it will
assuredly mean that the capitaHst class will, through Govern-
ment Departments, exercise over the national forces, and over
the workers, a domination that is even more rigid than is the
case to-day. And the Syndicalist also declares that in the
near future the industrially organised workers will themselves
undertake the entire responsibility of running the industries
in the interest of all who work, and are entitled to enjoy the
result of labour." ^ " We therefore most certainly favour
strikes ; we shall always do our best to help strikes to be
successful, and shall prepare the way as rapidly as possible for
The General Strike of national proportions. This will be
the actual Social and Industrial Revolution. The workers
will refuse to any longer manipulate the machinery of produc-
tion in the interest of the capitalist class, and there will be
no power on earth able to compel them to work when they
thus refuse. . . . When the capitalists get tired of running
industries, the workers will cheerfully invite them to abdicate,
and through and by their industrial organisations will run
the industries themselves in the interests of the whole
community." ^ " Finally, and vitally essential it is," sums
up Mr. Tom Mann in 1911, " to show that economic emanci-
pation to the working class can only be secured by the
working class asserting its power in workshops, factories,
warehouses, mills and mines, on ships and boats and engines,
and wherever work is performed, ever extending their
control over the tools of production, until, by the power of
the internationally organised Proletariat, capitalist pro-
duction shall entirely cease, and the industrial socialist
republic will be ushered in, and thus the Social Revolution
realised." ^
^ The Syndicalist, January 1912. Column entitled, " What we Syn-
dicalists are after" (by Tom Mann).
* The Industrial Syndicalist, March 191 1. "The Weapon Shaping"
(by Tom Mann ; p. 5).
^ Ibid., April 191 1. "A Twofold Warning" (by Tom Mann) We
are concerned, in this volume, only with the effect of these new movements
of working-class thought upon British Trade Unionism, and this is not
the occasion for any complete appreciation of Syndicalism or Industrial
Industrial Unionism 659
The revolutionary Industrial Unionism and Syndicalism
preached by James Connolly and Tom Mann and other
fervent missionaries between 1905 and 1912 did not commend
itself to the officials and leaders of the Trade Unions any
more than it did to the cautious and essentially Conservative-
minded men and women who make up the rank and file
of the British working class. But, hke other revolutionary
movements in England, it prepared the way for constitu-
tional proposals. The ideal of taking over the instruments
of production appealed to all intelligent workmen as work-
men. To them it seemed merely Co-operative Production
writ large, the ownership of the instruments and of the
product of labour by the workers themselves. But the
ownership and management was now to be carried out,
not by small competing estabUshments doomed to failure,
but in the industry as a whole by a " blackleg-proof " Trade
Union. To the ideaUstic and active-minded Trade Union
official in particular, weary of the perpetual hagghng with
employers over fractional changes in wages and hours, the
prospect of becoming the representative of his fellow-workers
in a self-governing industry, with all the initiative and
responsibility that such a position would involve, was
decidedly attractive. So long as this ideal was associ-
ated with violent and revolutionary methods, and left no
room for the pohtical democracy to which Englishmen are
Unionism. The Syndicalist Movement in this countr>^ had died down
prior to the war, but the Industrial Unionist Movement simmered on in
the Clyde district and in South Wales. Its chief organisation is the
Sbciahst Labour Party, which is not, and has never been, connected either
with any other Socialist organisation in this country or with the Labour
Party that is described in the next chapter. It was, we think, the moving
spirits of the Socialist Labour Party who were, as Trade Unionist workmen,
mainly responsible for the aggressive action of the Clyde Workers Com-
mittee between 1915 and 1918, and also for the rise of the Shop Stewards
Movement, and for its spread from the Clyde to EngUsh engineering
centres. At the present moment (1920) the Socialist Labour Part}', owing
to the personal quahties of its leading spirits, J. T. Murphy and A.
MacManus, holds the leading position in this school of thought, which
received a great impulse from the accession of Lenin to power in Russia.
But it remains a ferment rather than a statistically important element in
the Trade Union world.
66o The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
accustomed, or even for the Consumers' Co-operative Move-
ment, it failed to get accepted either by responsible officials
or by the mass of sober-minded members. The bridge
between the old conception of Trade Unionism and the new
was built by a fresh group of Socialists, who called them-
selves National Guildsmen. This group of able thinkers,
largely drawn from the Universities, accepted from what
we may call the Communal Socialists the idea of the
ownership of the instruments of production by the repre-
sentatives of the citizen-consumers, but proposed to vest the
management in national associations of the producers in
each industry — organisations which they declared ought to
include, not merely the present wage-earners, but all the
workers, by hand or by brain. ^ These guilds were to grow
out of the existing Trade Unions, gradually made co-exten-
sive with each industry. We have neither the space, nor
would it be within the scope of this book, to describe or
criticise this conception of National Guilds, or the theories
and schemes of the Guild Socialists. These theories and
schemes are none the worse for being still in the making.
What we are concerned with, as historians of the Trade
Union Movement, is the rapid adoption between 1913 and
1920 by many of the younger leaders of the Movement, and
subject to various modifications, also by some of the most
powerful of the Trade Unions, of this new ideal of the develop-
^ The revival of the Owenite proposal to develop existing Trade
Unions into great Associations of Producers for the carrying on of each
industry must be attributed perhaps to Mr. A. J. Penty {The Restoration
of the Gild System, IQ06), or to Mr. A. R. Orage, aided by Mr. S. G. Hobson,
in a series of articles in The New Age, 191 1 (afterwards published in a
volume. National Guilds, 1913, edited bj"^ A. R. Orage). But The New
Age had a limited circulation in the Trade Union world, and the plan
proposed was not worked out in detail. The idea was afterwards de-
veloped by Mr. G. D. H. Cole and his associates, and widely promulgated
in the Trade Union world. An organisation for this propaganda, the
National Guilds' League, was started in 191 5, and has now a membership
of several lumdrcd, amongst whom are included some of the younger
leaders of the Trade Union Movement. It publishes a monthly, The
Guildsman, edited by Mr. and Mrs. G. D. H. Cole. The various books
by Mr. Cole — especially The World of Labour, Self-Governmetit in Industry,
and Labour in the Commonwealth — should also be consulted.
A Share in Management 66 1
ment of the existing Trade Unions into self-organised, self-
contained, self-governing industrial democracies, as supply-
ing the future method of conducting industries and services.
The schemes put forward by the National Union of Rail-
waymen, the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, and the
Union of Postal Workers differ widely from the revolutionary
SyndicaHsm of Mr. Tom Mann and the large visions of the
Industrial Workers of the World. They do not even go so
far as the projects of the National Guildsmen. In fact, they
Hmit the claim of the manual workers merely to participa-
tion in the management, fully conceding that the final
authority must be vested in the representatives of the
community of citizens or consumers. Thus we see the
Annual General Meeting of the National Union of Railway-
men in 1914 resolving unanimously : " That this Congress,
while reaffirming previous decisions in favour of the
nationahsation of railways, and approving the action of
the Executive Committee in arranging to obtain and give
evidence before the Royal Commission, declares that no
system of State ownership of the railways will be acceptable
to organised railwaymen which does not guarantee to them
their full political and social rights, allow them a due measure
of control and responsibility in the safe and efficient working of
the railway system, and assure to them a fair and equitable
participation of the increased benefits likely to accrue from
a more economical and scientific administration." ^ In a
modified form this resolution was brought forward by the
Railway Clerks' Association, supported by the N.U.R., and
passed by the Trades Union Congress of 1917.^ A similar
^ N.U.R. Agenda and Decisions of the Annual General Meeting, June
1914, p. 7.
* The resolution runs as follows : " That in view of the success which,
in spite of unparalleled difficulties, has attended the working of the rail-
ways under State control, this Congress urge the Parhamentary Congress
to press the Government to arrange for the complete nationahsation of
all the railways, and to place them under a Minister of Railways, who
shall be responsible to ParUament, and be assisted by national and local
advisory committees, upon which the organised railway workers shall be
adequately represented" {Trades Union Congress Annual Report, 1917, p. 345).
662 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
movement in favour of participation in management has
taken root among the postal workers of all kinds, in England
as also in France. At the Annual Conference, in May 1919,
of the Postal and Telegraph Clerks' Association, which had
in previous years been passing resolutions on the subject, it
was emphatically pointed out that the control demanded by
the postal employees was not restricted to securing better
conditions of employment, but that they desired to partici-
pate in directing the technical improvement of the service
for the good of the community.^ The Conference resolved :
" That" in view of the obstructive attitude of the Department
on the question of the development of the Post Office
Savings Bank, the modernising of the Post Office Insurance
System, and the expansion and improvement of the Post
Office Services generally, this Conference directs that
representatives of the Association be appointed to investigate
and report on the working of the postal cheque and transfer
services from both the national and international stand-
point, and that the report be widely circulated, and propa-
ganda work undertaken, so that this development of the
Post Office Savings Bank — giving a greatly improved trans-
mission of moneys system — be introduced throughout." ^
Finally, we may cite the scheme for the Nationalisation of
the Coal-mines that the Miners' Federation brought formally
before the Coal Industry Commission in 1919. Six years
previously the Miners' Federation had had a Bill drafted
and published, which provided merely for the vesting of the
collieries in a Ministry of Mines, and for the administration
of the whole industry by that department.^ All that the
Federation was then concerned to secure for the miners
themselves was the continuance of free and lawful Trade
Unionism. The Bill of 1919* imposed on the Minister of
1 Postal and Telegraph Record, May 22, rgig, p. 237.
« Ibid.
3 The Nationalisation of Mines Bill (Fabian Tract, No. 171, 1913)-
« The Nationalisation of Mines and Minerals Bill, 1919, given in full in
Further Facts frqm the Coal Commission, by R. Page Arnot, 1919. The
Miners' Federation Conference of 1918 had passed the follo^^'ing resolution :
Direct Action 663
Mines a whole series of National and District Councils, and
Pit Committees, each of which was to consist, to the extent
of one half, of members nominated by the Federation, the
other half being nominated by the Minister ; and the
expectation was not concealed that it would be by these
bipartite bodies that the administration would be conducted.
We record these schemes, which are by the nature of the case
only imperfect drafts prepared for propaganda, not so much
for their importance as precisely defined industrial constitu-
tions, but as being indicative of the change of spirit that has
come over the Trade Union world.
The Increased Reliance on Direct Action
The acceptance, during the last decade, by Parliament,
by the Executive Government, and by pubhc opinion, of
the Trade Union organisation as part of the machinery of
government in all matters concerning the hfe and labour
of the manual working class, has been coincident, some
would say paradoxically coincident, with an increased
reliance on the strike, commonly known as the method of
Direct Action, and with an enlargement of the purposes for
which this method is used by Trade Unionists. There is
an impression in the pubhc mind, which easily forgets its
previous impressions of the same kind, that we are to-day
(1920) hving in an era of strikes. Although this impression
" That in the opinion of this Conference the time has arrived in the history
of the coal-mining industry when it is clearly in the national interests to
transfer the entire industry from private ownership and control to State
ownership with joint control and administration by the workmen and the
State. In pursuance of this opinion the National Executive be instructed
to immediately reconsider the draft BiU for the Nationalisation of the
Mines ... in the hght of the newer phases of development in the industry,
so as to make provision for the aforesaid joint control and administration
when the measure becomes law ; further, a Conference be called at an
early date to receive a report from the Executive Committee upon the
draft proposals and to determine the best means of co-operating with the
National Labour Party to ensure the passage of a new Bill into law " {Report
of Annual Conference of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, July 9,
1918, p. 44).
664 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
is not justified by the number of strikes, as compared with
those of 1825, 1833-34, 1857-60, 1871-74, and 1885-86,
there is some basis for the feehng. The strikes and threats
of strikes during the past decade (excluding the four years
of war) have been on a larger scale, and, in a sense, more
menacing, than those of previous periods. When we pub-
lished, in 1897, our detailed analysis of the theory and
practice of contemporary Trade Unionism {Industrial
Democracy), the very term " direct action " was unknown
in this country. The strike was regarded, not as a distinct
method of Trade Union action, but merely as the culminating
incident of a breakdown of the Method of Collective Bar-
gaining.^ The Trade Union plea for the right to strike has
♦ always been a simple one. It is a mere derivative of the
right of Freedom of Contract. WTienever an individual
workman had the right to refuse to enter or continue in a
contract of service, any group of individuals might, if they
chose, exercise a like freedom. After the collapse of Owen-
ism and Chartism all thought of using the weapon of the
strike, otherwise than as an incident in Collective Bargaining
with the employers, seems to have left the Trade Union
Movement in Great Britain. Indeed, during the last half
of the nineteenth century, the -use of the weapon of the
strike was falling into disrepute, even as an incident of
Collective Bargaining, not only among the officials of the
great trade friendly societies, such as the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers and Carpenters, but also among the
younger and more militant members of the Trade Union
movement. The " extremists " of the last decade of the
1 At the end of our chapter on the " Method of Collective Bargaining "
we cursorily dealt with the strike as a necessary incident of collective bar-
gaining : " It is impossible to deny that the perpetual liability to end in
a strike or a lock-out is a grave drawback to the Method of Collective
Bargaining. So long as the parties to a bargain are free to agree or not
to agree, it is inevitable that, human nature being as it is, there should
now and again come a deadlock, loading to that trial of strength and
endurance which lies behind all bargaining. We know of no device for
avoiding this trial of strength except a deliberate decision of the community
expressed in legislative enactment " (Industrial Democracy, p. 221).
The Instirrectionary Strike 665
nineteenth century, as we have described in a previous
chapter, were out for the " capture " of Parhament and
Local Authorities by an " independent " Party of Labour ;
and pohtical action was commonly regarded as the shortest
and most convenient way of securing not only Socialist
but also the distinctively Trade Union objects. It was at
that time left to the "reactionaries" in the Trade Union
Movement, who disliked the idea of a pohtical Labour Party,
to advocate rehance on " ourselves alone." ^
But with the revolution of thought that we have de-
scribed there has arisen, with regard to Direct Action, a
change of practice. In 1913-14 there was an outburst of
exasperated strikes designed, we may almost say, to super-
sede Collective Bargaining — to repudiate any making of
long-term agreements, to spring demand after demand upon
employers, to compel every workman to join the Union,
avowedly with the view of building up the Trade Union
as a dominant force. This spasm of industrial " insurrec-
tionism " was abruptly stopped by the outbreak of war.
The " political " element creeps in with the strikes and
threats of strikes of the Miners' Federation in 1912 and
1919, designed, not to further Collective Bargaining with
the employers, but to cause the Government and Parhament
to alter the organisation of the industry, in the earher case
by the enactment of a Minimum Wage law, and in the
other by the ehmination of the capitahst profitmaker in
favour of pubhc ownership and workers' control. During
the years of war Direct Action took another form. The
weapon of a concerted refusal to work was used by some
Trade Unions, in matters entirely unconnected with their
conditions of emplojonent. in order to prevent particular
individuals from doing what they wished to do. The most
sensational examples were afforded by the National Union
of Sailors and Firemen in 1917-18, when its members, by
refusing to work, at the dictation of Mr. J. Havelock Wilson,
^ See, for instance, Trade Unionism New and Old, by George Howell
1891.
666 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
the Secretary of the Union, prevented certani Labour
Leaders ^ from proceeding to Petrograd, actually by direc-
tion of the Government ; and subsequently others ^ from
going to Paris with Government passports, on the instruc-
tions of the Labour Party, because the Union, or at any rate
Mr. Havelock Wilson, disapproved of these visits, and of
their supposed object in arranging for an International
Labour and Socialist Congress. Another case was the
withdrawal by the Electrical Trades Union in 1918 of their
members (taking with them the indispensable fuses) from
the Albert Hall in London, when the directors of the Hall
cancelled its letting for a Labour Demonstration, of the
purposes and resolutions of which they disapproved, or
thought that their patrons would disapprove. What the
Electrical Trades Union intimated was that, unless the Hall
was allowed, as heretofore, to be used for Labour meetings,
it should not be used for a forthcoming demonstration of
the supporters of the Coalition Government, or for any other
meetings. The result was that (it is said on a hint from
Downing Street) the directors of the Hall withdrew their
objection to the Labour Demonstration, and have since
continued to allow such meetings. Yet another example
of Direct Action was given by the printing staffs of certain
newspaper offices in London during the railway strike of
1919, when they threatened instantly to withdraw their
labour, and thus absolutely to prevent the issue of the
newspapers, unless the use of " lying posters " was given
up, and unless the case of the National Union of Railwaymen
was fairly treated in the papers, and accorded reasonable
space. The gravest case of all was the threat bj' the Miners'
Federation in 1919, that all the coal-mines might stop
working unless Compulsory Military Service was immedi-
^ Mr. G. H. Roberts (Typographical Society), then Parhamentary
Secretary to the Board of Trade ; and Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, Trea-
surer of the Labour Party.
'^ The Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson (Friendly Society of Ironfoundcrs),
and M. Camille Huysmans, Secretary of the International Socialist Con-
grtss.
The Causes of Direct Action 667
ately brought to an end, and unless the poHcy of mihtary
intervention in Russia against the Bolshevik Government
of Russia was abandoned. By what was perhaps a fortunate
coincidence the Secretary of State for War was able to
declare that all Compulsory Mihtary Service was to cease
at or before the end of the current financial year ; and the
Prime Minister to announce that no more troops, and, after
certain consignments already arranged for, no more mihtary
stores, would be sent in aid of those who were attacking
the Bolshevik Government.
How far can these instances of Direct Action be deemed
to indicate a change of thought in the Trade Union world
with regard to the use of the strike weapon ? We must
note that, in spite of the temporary lull in strikes in the
latter part of the last century, there has been no change in
Trade Union policy with regard to the strike in disputes
with employers about the conditions of emplo\Tnent. The
Trade Unions have always included in this term the dis-
missal of men for reasons other than their inefficiency as
workmen, the engagement of non-Unionists, the presence
of an obnoxious foreman or manager, or any interference
with the conduct of employees outside the works. Nor
has there been any development in the original Trade
Union position with regard to sympathetic strikes in aid
of other sections of workers in their struggles with their
employers. It is possible that some of the insurrectionary
strikes of 1911-14 were inspired b}^ the new thought that
we have described — the disillusionment as to the Parha-
mentary potency of a Labour Party, and the vision of a
Democracy based on industrial organisation and secured
b}^ industrial action. But, in the mam, the increased
frequency and magnitude of strikes in these years are
sufficiently accounted for by the continued fall in real
wages due to rising prices, combined with the steadily
improving organisation of the workers concerned. There
was a new element in the proposal of the Miners' Federation
in 1919 to strike if the Government did not fulfil its pledge
668 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
to carry into effect the Sankey Report described in the last
chapter. The significant and authoritative declaration in
the first Report of March 20, 1919, that " the present
system of ownership and working in the coal industry
stands condemned, and some other system must be substi-
tuted for it, either nationalisation or a method of unification
by national purchase and/or by joint control," and the
exphcit acceptance of this Report by the Government " in
the spirit and in the letter," formed an integral part of the
bargain between the Miners' Federation and the Government,
on the strength of which they forewent the strike at the
end of March 1919 on which they had decided. It can
hardly be contended that the " present system, of ownership
and working " is not a necessary part of the conditions of
employment, or that the Miners are not entitled to refuse
to enter into contracts of service under a system that Mr.
Bonar Law agrees with Mr, Justice Sankey, and nine out
of the other twelve members of the Royal Commission,
in holding to " stand condemned." On the other hand,
though the Government controls the industry and dictates
the wages, the alterations in the conditions of employment
that the Miners' Federation a^ks for require not only one
but probably several Acts of Parliament, which a majority
of the members of the present House of Commons, notwith-
standing the explicit Government pledge, refuses to pass.
What the Miners' Federation threatens, by a stoppage of
the coal industry, is to coerce into agreement with them
not their employers, the colliery owners, not even the
Ministry with whom they made the bargain, but, in effect,
the recalcitrant capitalist majority of the House of Commons
which cannot be displaced without a General Election.
But an entirely new development of Direct Action, aUke
in form and in substance, is the distinctly political, or, as
we should prefer to call it, the non-economic strike — that
is, the strike, not for any alteration in the conditions of
employment of any section of the Trade Union world, but
with a view to enforce, either on individuals, on Parliament;
The Political Strike 669
or on the Government, some other course of action desired
by the strikers. So far as we know, there is, on this question,
no consistent body of opinion in the Trade Union world ;
all that we find are currents of opinion arising from different
assumptions of social expediency. There is, first, a small
section of Trade Unionists who are Syndicahsts or extreme
Industrial Unionists in opinion, and who look forward to
the supersession of poUtical Democracy, and the reconstitu-
tion of society on the basis of the suffrages of the several
trades. Like the Sinn Feiners in Ireland, though on different
grounds, they do not acknowledge the competency of the
existing Parhament to undertake the government of the
country, and they advocate Direct Action as the only
weapon of revolt accessible to the workers organised as
workers. But it was no such theory of social revolution
that induced Mr. Havelock Wilson to prevent the visit of
Mr. G. H. Roberts and Mr. MacDonald to Petrograd, when
the Government wished them to go ; or to prevent Mr.
Henderson and M. Camille Huysmans from using their
passports to Paris. Nor were the electricians of the Albert
HaU inspired by faith in an immediate revolution of the
Russian type. It cannot even be suggested that the wide-
spread approval by the more active spirits of the Trade
Union world of the proposed strike to stop the intervention
of Great Britain in support of the reactionary Russian
leaders was accompanied by any desire to set up in Great
Britain the constitution which is beHeved to obtain in
Moscow and Petrograd. We must look elsewhere for the
motive that underlies and is held by many to justify the
non-economic or " political " strike.
We suggest that the explanation is a more complex one.
We have first the impulsive tendency of some men in all
classes to use any powers that they possess, whether over
land, capital, or labour, to dictate to their fellow-men a
course of conduct on any question on which they feel hotly,
even if it is wholly unconnected with their several economic
functions. This deUght in an anarchic use of economic
670 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
power is, it is needless to say, not peculiar to those whose
economic power is that of labour. There have been in-
numerable instances, within our own memories, among
landlords and capitalists, of actions no less arbitrary than
that of Mr. Havelock Wilson (who, it must be remembered,
had the general approval of the capitalist press ; and, in
the case of the attempted internment in this country of a
distinguished Belgian visitor, M. Huysmans, the connivance
of the naval officers, if not of the Admiralty). We find
within the last few decades many cases of landlords who
have ejected persons, not because they were objectionable
tenants, or had failed to pay their rent, but because they
had supported a political candidate, or had led to action
on the part of the Local Authority, to which the landlord
objected. We have seen landed proprietors refusing sites
for Nonconformist chapels, not because they objected to
buildings of that character, or were dissatisfied with the
price offered, but because they disHked the theology of the
promoters. We have heard of banks refusing to the Trade
Unions who were their customers any accommodation at
all on the occasion of a strike, merely because they disliked
the strike. We have seen employers dismissing workmen,
not for their inefficiency, not even for their Trade Union
activities, which might be held to affect the economic
interest of the capitaHst, but because the workmen held
different political opinions from those of the employer.
But these cases of the use of economic power to prevent
individuals from pursuing or promoting their own religious
or political creeds are emphatically condemned by the
Trade Union Movement. Thus no Trade Union support
was overtly given to Mr. Havelock Wilson, even by those
Trade Union leaders who agreed wifh him in detesting any
meeting between Britons and enemy subjects.
We have a quite different class of cases when Direct Action
is taken in reprisal for the Direct Action of other persons or
groups of persons. This was the case in the strike of the
electricians at the Albert Hall. It was a reprisal for the
The Non-Economic Strike 671
use by the directors of the Albert Hall of their power ovei
lettings to bann opinions that they happened to dislike,
whilst permitting the use of their hall to the other side.
A more difficult case is that of the threatened refusal to
work of the compositors against the newspapers who denied
fair play to the railwaymen. Here our judgement may
depend on what view is taken of the function of newspapers ;
how far are newspapers what their name imphes, the public
purve3^ors of news ? Supposing that all the capitalist
press were deliberately to boycott all Labour news, whilst
dehberately gi\"ing currency to false statements about
Labour Leaders and the Labour Movement, would the
compositors, as representing the Trade Union world in this
industry, be justified in a strike ? The only conclusion we
"can suggest is that, human nature being instinctively
militant, any anarchic use of the power given by one form
of monopoly will lead to a similar anarchic use of the power
given by another form of monopoly.
We come now to the third class of use of the method of
Direct Action, a general strike of the manual workers to
compel the Government of the country to abstain from
political courses distasteful to those who control a monopoly
of labour power, or to the majority of them. This form of
Direct Action is justified by a minority of Trade Unionists,
who consider that under the present constitution of ParUa-
ment the organised workmen have practically no chance
of getting their fair share of representation-^ an argument
strengthened by every election trick, and especially by the
partisan use of the capitaUst press as an election instrument.
The majority of Trade Unionists, however, do not, at the
present time, seem to support this view. They reply that
the manual workers and their wives now constitute, in
every district, a majority of the electorate. They can, if
they choose, return to Parliament a Labour majority and
make a Labour Government. This very consideration,
indeed, seems to make any such general strike impracticable,
and, as a matter of fact, no such proposal of a general strike
672 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
has yet been endorsed by the Trades Union Congress. We
can imagine occasions that might, in the eyes of the Trade
Union world, fully justify a general strike of non-economic
or political character. If, for instance, a reactionary
Parliament were to pass a measure disfranchising the bulk
of the manual workers, or depriving them of political power
by such a device as the " Three Class Franchise " of Prussia
and Saxony — if any Act were passed depriving the Trade
Unions of the rights and liberties now conceded to them —
if the Executive or the judges were to use against the Trade
Unions, by injunction or otherwise, any weapon that might
be fished up from the legal armoury, confiscating their funds
or prohibiting their action — then, indeed, we might see the
Trades Union Congress recommending a General Strike ; and
it would be supported not only by the wage-earning class
as a whole, but also by a large section of the middle class,
and even by some members of the House of Lords. That
is one reason why, short of madness, no such act would be
committed by the Government or by ParUament. If an}'
such act were perpetrated, it would probably involve a
revolution not in the British but in the continental sense.
It must be remembered that the " last word " in Direct
Action is with the poUce and the army, and there not with
the officers but with the rank and file.
To sum up, the vast majority of Trade Unionists object
to Direct Action, whether by landlords or capitalists or by
organised workers, for objects other than those connected
with the economic function of the Direct Actionists. Trade
Unionists, on the whole, are not prepared to disapprove of
Direct Action as a reprisal for Direct Action taken by other
persons or groups. With regard to a general strike of non-
economic or poHtical character, in favour of a particular
home or foreign policy, we very much doubt whether the
Trade Union Congress could be induced to endorse it, or
the rank and file to carry it out, except only in case the
Government made a direct attack upon the political or
industrial liberty of the manual working class, which it
Elimination of the Capitalist 673
seemed imperative to resist by every possible means, not
excluding forceful revolution itself.
The Demand for the Elimination of the
Capitalist Profit-maker
It is interesting to note that this widening enlargement
of the aspirations and purposes of Trade Unionism has
been accompanied, not by any decline, but by an actual
renewal of the faith in Communal Socialism, towards which
we described the Trade Union Movement as tending in
1889-94. For the Trade Unionist objects, more strongly
than ever, to any financial partnership with the capitalist
employers, or with the shareholders, in any industry or
service, on the sufficient ground that any such sharing of
profits would, whilst leaving intact the tribute of rent and
interest to proprietors, irretrievably break up the solidarity
of the manual working class. To the new school of Trade
Unionists the nationalisation or municipaUsation of industry,
or its assumption by consumers' co-operation, is a necessary
preliminary to the partnership of Labour in its government.
What they are after is to alter, not only the status of the
manual worker, but also the status of the employer who is
the director of industry ; they wish them both to become
the agents of the community ; they desire that manual
workers and brain workers alike should be inspired, not by
the greed of gain made by profit on price, but by the desire
to produce the commodities and services needed by the
community in return for a sufficient livehhood, and the
personal freedom and personal responsibihty which they
believe would spring from vocational self-government.
Thus we find Mr. Hodges, the General Secretary of the
Miners' Federation, in one of his numerous speeches in
favour of the nationalisation of the mines, declaring that
what they demanded was " a new status for the worker as
a controller of his industry. Miners were not anarchists,
although they had the power to be. They realised that
z
674 The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
their interests were bound up with those of the community,
and therefore they demanded conditions which would
develop the corporate sense. . . . Education was carrying
men along social rather than individualistic lines, and right
throughout the mining industry there was the desire to be
something different from what they were. This desire to
be master of the work in which the man was engaged was
the great thing that was vital in working-class life. . . .
There had never been a movement born of greater moral
aspiration than this movement for the nationalisation of the
mines. The miner wanted to be in a position where it would
be to him a point of honour not to allow even a piece of
timber to be wasted, where he would want to do his work
well. He wanted a Social Contract." ^
^ These extracts from a speech by Mr. Hodges are put together from
the separate imperfect reports in the Times, Daily News, and Daily Herald
of October 27, 1919. A more exphcit statement of Mr. Hodges' views
will be found in his speech at the Annual Conference of the Miners'
Federation in July 1918 : " For the last two or three years a new move-
ment has sprung up in the labour world which deals with the question
of joint control of the industry by representatives from the side which
represents, for the most part, the consumer, and representatives of the
workmen, who are the producers. Nationalisation in the old sense is no
longer attractive. As a matter of fact, you can have nationaUsation, but
still be in no better position than you are now under private ownership.
That is the experience of institutions which have been State owned and
State controlled for many years. The most remarkable scheme worked
out during the last year is the theory worked out by the . . . Postmen's
Federation. He has endeavoured to provide a scheme by which the postal
workers should have a definite amount of control, a definite form of control,
in the postal service, and in working it out he has demonstrated beyond all
doubt how at every point he is up against the power of the bureaucrats,
as exemplified by the State. Now, is it any good to have these mines,
nationalised unless we are going to exercise some form of control as pro-
ducers ? If not, the whole tendency will be towards the power of bureau-
cracy. We shall be given no status at all in the industry, except to be the
mere producers, as we have been in the past years. Under State owner-
ship the workmen should be desirous of having something more than the
mere question of wages or the mere consideration of employment ; the
workmen should have some directive power in the industry in which they
are engaged. Now, how are we going to have this directive power under
State control ? I think we must admit that the side representing the
consumers (the State) should have some form of control on property
which will be State property, and when a national industry becomes State
controlled you must liave permanent officials to look after the consumers'
The Effect of Profiteering 675
The demand for the nationahsation or municipalisation
of industries and services, or their absorption by the Con-
sumers' Co-operative Movement, was greatly strengthened
by the experience, during the war and after the. Arrnistice,
of the failure of every alternative method of preventing
" profiteering." The rapid development of capitalist com-
binations and price-agreements ^ ; the ill-success of the
most stringent Government control in preventing alarming
increases of price ; the inability of even legally fixed maxi-
mum prices to do anything more, under private ownership,
than authorise the charge required to cover the cost at the
least efficient and least well - equipped establishment of
which the output was needed ; the enormous and even
unprecedented profits made throughout the whole range of
business enterprise ; the helplessness of the consumers, in
the mere expectation of shortage, and their willingness to
pay almost any price that was demanded rather than go
without — combined with the obvious breakdown of capi-
talist competition as a safeguard of the public which the
proceedings under the Profiteering Act revealed — all these
things co-operated to convince the bulk of the wage-earning
class, many of the families living on fixed incomes, and (in
interests, and from the purely producers' point of view the Miners' Federa-
tion must represent the producers in the central authority and in the
decentralised authority, right down to the separate colUeries. Are we
ready to do this ? Are we prepared for this, starting at the separate
colUeries, indicating how the industry is to be developed locally ?
Men must take their share in understanding all the relations embodied
in the export side of the trade ; they must take a share even in control-
hng the banking arrangements which govern the financial side of the
industry, and with that comes a very great deal of responsibihty. Now,
are we prepared to assume that responsibihty, a responsibihty which is
imphed in the term v/orkmen's control ? It is going to be a big task and
a test of the educational attainments of the miners themselves if they
assume control of the industry, and if it did not thrive under that control
there is the possibihty we should have to hark back to private ownership
in order to make it successful. ... I hold these views, and unless they
are accompanied by an effective form of working-class control, I do not
believe that nationalisation will do any good for anybody " {Report of
Annual Conference of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain, fuly g,
1918, pp. 49-51).
^ Report of the Committee on Combinations and Trusts, 1919.
67^ The Place of Trade Unionism in the State
pile of the objection to " bureaucratic control ") some even
among business men, that there was practically no other
course open, in the industries and services that were suffi-
ciently highly developed to render such a course practicable,
than a gradual substitution of public for private ownership.
This advance in public opinion is naturally reflected in the
passionate support of public ownership, with participation
of the workers in administration and control, given b}^ the
Trades Union Congress and Labour Party Conference.
It will have become clear from our review of the larger
conception now current of the place of Trade Unionism in
the State, that the Trade Unionist, as such, no longer retains
the acquiescent and neutral attitude towards the two great
parties of British politics, nor to the Capitalist System
itself, which characterised the Trade Unionism of thirty
or forty years ago. The object and purpose of the New
Unionism of 1913-19 — not without analogy with that
of 1830-34, but with a significant difference — cannot be
attained without the transformation of British politics,
and the supersession, in one occupation after another,
of the capitaHst profit-maker as the governor and director
of industry. Meanwhile, as a result of the successive
attacks upon the very existence of Trade Unionism, even in
its most limited form, there has been growing up a distinct
political organisation of the Trade Union Movement, aiming
at securing the acceptance by the electorate, as a whole^ of a
definitely Socialist policy in the administration of both
home and foreign affairs. It is this formation of a Labour
Party, ready for the carr3'ing into effect of the new ideas, that
we have now to describe.
CHAPTER XI
POLITICAL ORGANISATION
[19OO-I920]
Fifty years ago, wherr Professor Brentano described the
British Trade Union Movement with greater knowledge and
insight than any one else had then shown/ nothing seemed
more unhkely than that the Movement would become
organised as an independent pohtical party, appealing to
the whole electorate on a general programme, returning its
own contingent of members to the House of Commons, and
asserting a claim, as soon as that contingent should become
the strongest party in Parhament, to constitute a national
administration. For nearly a quarter of a century more, as
we have described in a previous chapter, though Trade
Unionism was making itself slowly more and more felt in
politics, it was still possible for economists and statesmen
to believe that " Labour " in Great Britain would organise
only to maintain its sectional industrial interests, and that
it would impinge on pohtics, if at all, onh^ occasionally, in
defence of Trade Unionism itself, or in support of some
particular project of industrial law. By 1894, when the
first edition of this book was published, there was already
1 See his Arbettergilden der Gegenwart, 1871-72 ; his more generalised
survey. Das Arbeitsverhdltniss gemdss den heutigen Recht (Leipsic, 1877),
translated as The Relation of Labour to the Law of To-day (New York,
1890) ; and his article on " The Growth of a Trades Union," in the North
British Review, October 1870.
677
678 Political Organisation
manifest, as we then stated, a great shifting of Trade Union
opinion on the
" pressing question of the position to be taken by the Trade
Union world in the party struggles of To-day and the politics of
To-morrow. In our chapter on ' The Old Unionism and the
New,' we described the rapid conversion' of the superior work-
man to the general principles of Collectivism. This revolution
of opinion in the rank and file has been followed by a marked
change of front on the part of the salaried officials, and by a
growing distrust of the aristocratic and middle-class representa-
tives of both the great pohtical parties. To the working-man
politician of 1S94 it seems inconceivable that either landlords or
capitalists will actively help him to nationaUse land and mining
royalties, to absorb unearned incomes by taxation, or to control
private enterprise in the interests of the wage-earner. Thus we
find throughout the whole Trade Union world an almost unani-
mous desire to make the working-class organisations in some
way effective for political purposes. Nor is this a new thing.
The sense of solidarity has, as we have seen, never been lacking
among those active soldiers and non-commissioned officers who
constitute the most vital element in the Trade Union army.
The generous aid from trade to trade, the pathetic attempts to
form General Unions, the constant aspirations after universal
federation, all testify to the reality and force of this instinctive
soUdarity. The Collectivist faith of the ' New Unionism ' is
only another manifestation of the same deep-rooted belief in the
essential Brotherhood of Labour. But, as we have seen, the
basis of the association of these million and a half wage-eamsrs
is, primarily, sectional in its nature. They come together, and
contribute their pence, for the defence of their interests as
Boilermakers, Miners, Cotton-spinners, and not directly for "the
advancement of the whole working class. Among the salaried
officers of the Unions, it is, as we have said, the Trade Official,
chosen and paid for the express purpose of maintaining the
interests of his own particular trade, who is the active force.
The effect has been to intensify the sectionalism to which an
organisation based on trades must necessarily be prone. The
vague general Collectivism of the non-commissioned officers has
hitherto got translated into practical proposals only in so far as
it can be expressed in projects for the advantage of a particular
trade. Some organised trades have known liow to draft and to
extort from rarliament a voluminous Labour Code, tlie pro-
The Labour Party 679
visions of which are exceptionally well adapted for the protec-
tion of the particular workers concerned. The ' particulars
clause ' ^ and the law against the ' over-steaming ' of weaving
sheds are, for instance, triumphs of collective control which
could hardly have been conceived by any one except the astute
trade officials of the Cotton Operatives. But there is no attempt
to deal with any question as a whole. Trade Unionists are, for
instance, unanimously in favour of drastic legislation to put
down ' sweating ' in all trades whatsoever. But no salaried
officer of the Trade Union world feels it to be his business to
improve the Labour Code for any industry but his own. Thus,
whereas the Factory Acts have been effectively elaborated to
meet the special circumstances of a few trades, for all the rest
they remain in the form of merely general prohibitions which it
is practically impossible to enforce. How far it is possible,
by the development of Trades Councils, the reform of the
Trades Union Congress, the increased efficiency of the Parha-
mentary Committee, the growth of Trade Union representa-
tion in the House of Commons, or, finally, by the creation of
any new federal machinery, to counteract the fundamental
sectionalism of Trade Union organisation, to supplement the
speciaUsed trade officials by an equally speciaHsed Civil Service
of working-class politicians, and thus to render the Trade Union
world, with its million of electors, and its leadership of Labour,
an effective pohtical force in the State, is, on the whole, the
most momentous question of contemporary politics." ^
The quarter of a century that has elapsed sii^e these
words were wTitten has seen an extensive pohtical develop-
ment of the Trade Union Movement, taking the form of
building up a separate and independent party of " Labour "
in the House of Commons, which we have now to record.^
^ Sec. 24 of the Factory Act of 1891 provides, as regards textile manu-
factures, that the employer shall supply every worker by the piece with
certain particulars as to the quantity of work and rate of remuneration
for it.
2 History of Trade Unionism, by S. and B. Webb, 1st ed., 1894,
pp. 476-78.
^ The most important sources of information are the Annual Reports
of the Trades Union Congress, 1874-1919, and other publications of its
Parhamentary Committee ; those of the Annual Conferences of the
Labour Representation Committee, 190 1-5, and of the Labour Party,
1906—19, together with the Party's other publications, especially Labour
and the New Social Order, 191 8 ; the reports and contemporary publica-
68o Poliiical Organisation
The continued propaganda of the Socialists, and of others
who wished to see the Trade Union Movement become an
effective poHtical force, which we have described as active
from 1884 onwards, did not, for nearly a couple of decades,
produce a pohtical " Labour Party." So strong was at
that time the resistance of most of the Trade Union leaders
to any participation of their societies in general politics,
even on the lines of complete independence of both Liberal
and Conservative Parties, that " Labour Representation "
had still, for some years, to be fought for apart from Trade
Unionism. The leaders, indeed, did not really care about
Trade Union influence in the House of Commons.^ Many
tions of the Socialist Societies, especially the Independent Labour Party
from 1893, and the Fabian Society from 1884; Labour Year Book for
1916 and 1919; History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, vol. ii., 1920;
History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, 2 vols.,
1910, 1916 ; Die englische Arbeiterpartei, by G. Guettler, 1914 ; Aims oj
Labour, by Rt. Hon. A. Henderson, 1918 ; History 0/ the Fabian Society,
by E. R. Pease, 1916; Llistory of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey,
1912 ; biographies of Joseph Arch, Henry Broadhurst, Robert Applegarth,
Thomas Burt, John Wilson, J. H. Thomas, W. J. Davis, etc.
^ The movement for " Labour Representation " (which " at that time
meant working-men members of Parliament and nothing else," History
of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912) was first got under
way by George Potter's London Working Men's Association in 1S66;
mentioned at the end of Chapter VI. At the second Trades Union Con-
gress, at Birmingham in 1869, a paper had been read on " Direct Labour
Representation in Parliament," but Congress took no action. A separate
" Labour Representation League " was then formed imder the presidency
of R. M. Lathom, a Chancery barrister, to which many leading Trade
Unionists belonged, of which Henry Broadhurst was secretary from 1872
to about 1878, and which sought from the Liberal Party opportunities
for the return of a few working-class members ; but (as formerly in tne
cases of William Newton's contest for the Tower Hamlets in 1852 and
George Odger's at South wark in 1870) in vain. At the General Election
of 1874, as we have already described, fourteen workmen went to the poU ;
but in ten of the constituencies they were fought by both parties, and
only in the other four did the Liberals allow them to be fought by Con-
servatives alone, with the result that two only (out of the latter four)
were elected, namely, Alexander RIacdonald and Thomas Burt. At the
General ICUction in 1880, again with Liberal acquiescence, Henry Broad-
hurst wa.s added to their number ; and in 1883 this was raised to eleven
(of whom six were miners). All those, whilst pushing measures desired
by the Trade Unions, acted habitually with the Liberal Party. In i8St>
—the Labour Representation League having faded away about 1S81 —
the Congress appointed a " Labour Electoml (Oinmittee " to do the
/. Keir Hardie 68 1
of them, as we have described, remained for a whole genera-
tion averse even from legal regulation of the conditions of
employment. In national politics they were mostly Liberals,
with the strongest possible admiration for Gladstone and
Bright ; or else (as in Lancashire) convinced Conservatives,
concerned to defend the Church of England or Roman
Catholic elementary schools in which their children were
being educated or carried away by the glamour of an
Imperialist foreign policy. They asked for nothing more
than a few working-class members in the House of Commons,
belonging to one or other of the " respectable " parties, to
which they could thus obtain access for the adjustment of any
matters in which their societies happened to be interested.
In 1887, at his first appearance at the Trades Union
Congress, J. Keir Hardie,^ representing a small Union of
same work ; but this was never able to free itself from subserviency to
the. Liberal Party, and it achieved no success, dying away in 1893. Some
personal reminiscences are given in " Labour Representation Thirty Years
Ago," by Henry Broadhurst, M.P., in the Fourth Annual Report of General
Federation of Trade Uniotis, 1903 ; see also History of Labour Representa-
tion, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912.
^ In a " scribbhng diary " of 1884 is the following entry :
" Written by Jas. K. Hardie, born August 15, 1856, married August 3,
1879, began work as a message boy in Glasgow when 8 years and 9 months
old, wrought for some time also in a printing office in Trongate, in the
brass finishing shop of the Anchor Line Shipping Co., also as a rivet
heater in Thompson's heatyard. Left Glasgow in the year 1866 and went
into No. 18 pit of the Moss at Newarthill, from thence to Quarter Iron
Works, and again to one or two other collieries in neighbourhood of
Hamilton. Was elected Secretary to JNliners' Association in 1878, and
for the same position in Ayrshire in 1879 ; resigned April, 1882, when got
appointment unsohcited as correspondent to Cumnock News. Brought
up an atheist, converted to Christianity in 1878."
Keir Hardie, whose Idndhness and integrity of character endeared him
to all who knew him, was from 1887 down to his death in 1915 the apostle
of " independency " in the pohtical organisation of Labour. He sat in
the Trades Union Congress from 1887 to 1895 as representative of the
Ayrshire Miners ; and in the House of Commons from 1892 to 1895 (for
West Ham), from 1906 to 1915 (for Merthyr). He was Chairman of the
" I.L.P." from 1893 to 1898, and again in 1914. Pending the pubUcation
of a biography by W. Stewart, reference may be made to a biographical
sketch entitled From Pit to Parliament, by Frank Smith ; a character
sketch by F. Pethick Lawrence in the Labour Record for August 1905 ;
the issues of the Labour Leader for September 30 and October 7, 1915 ;
Z 2
682 Political Organisation
Ayrshire ]^iners, demanded a new start. He called upon
the Trade Unionists definitely to sever their connection
with the existing political parties, by which the workmen
were constantly befooled and betrayed, and insisted on the
necessity of forming an entirely independent party of Labour,
to which the whole working-class movement should rally.
On the Congress he produced no apparent effect.^ But, six
months later, when a Parliamentary vacancy occurred in
Mid-Lanark, Keir Hardie was nominated, against Liberal
and Tory alike, on the principle of entire independence ;
and in spite of every effort to induce him to withdraw,^ he
went to the poll, obtaining only 619 votes. A society was
then formed to work for independent Labour representation,
under the designation of the Scottish Labour Party, having
for chairman Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., who
had been elected as a Liberal but who had become a Social-
ist. The " new spirit " of 1889, which we have described,
put heart into the movement for political independence ;
and after much further propaganda by the Socialists,^ at the
General Election of 1892 Keir Hardie was elected for West
Ham, avowedly as the first member of an independent Party
of Labour ; together with fourteen other workmen,* whose
independence of the Liberal Party, even where it was
and an article entitled " An Old Diary," by F. J. in the Socialist Review,
January 1919.
1 Anminl Report of Trades Union Congress, 1887.
2 It is said that the Liberal Party agents attempted, in vain, to bribe
him to withdraw ; eventually offering as high a price as a safe Liberal
seat on the first opportunity, all his election expenses, and ^^300 a year —
if only he would wear the Liberal badge !
^ See, for instance, the following " Fabian Tracts," which had a large
circulation among Trade Unionists : No. 6 of 1887, " The True Radical
Programme " ; No. 11 of 1890, " The Workers' PoUtical Programme " ;
No. 40 of 1892, " The Fabian Election Manifesto " ; No. 49 of 1894, " ^
Plan of Campaign for Labour " {History of the Fabian Society, by E. R.
Pease, 19 16).
* These included John Burns (Amalgamated Society of Engineers),
J. Havelock Wilson (National Sailors' and Firemen's Union), Joseph
Arch (Agricultural Labourers' Union), W. R. (afterwards Sir William)
Crcmer (General Union of Carpenters), G. Howell (Operative Bricklayors'
Society), J. Rowlands (an ex-watchcase-maker), and eight coalminers.
The I.L.P. 683
claimed, was less marked than their obvious jealousy of
Keir Hardie. There was apparently still no hope of gain-
ing the adherence of the Trade Unions as such ; and at the
Glasgow Trades Union Congress of 1892 arrangements were
made by a few of the delegates to hold a smaller conference,
which took place at Bradford, in 1893, under the chairman-
ship of Keir Hardie, when those who were determined to
establish a separate political party formed a society, made
up of individual adherents, which was styled the Independent
Labour Party. In this the Scottish Labour Party was
merged, but it remained without the affiliation of Trade
Unions in their corporate capacity. The Independent
Labour Part}^ of which throughout his hfe Keir Hardie
was the outstanding figure, carried on a strenuous propa-
gandist campaign, and during the next two years put up
independent candidates at by-elections, with uniform ill-
success. At the General Election of 1895, no fewer than
twenty-eight " I.L.P." candidates went to the poll, everyone
of them (including Keir Hardie himself at West Ham) being
unsuccessful. With two or three exceptions, the Trade
Unionist members in alliance with the Liberal Party suc-
cessfully maintained their seats. The estabhshment of an
aggressively independent Labour Party in ParHament still
looked hopeless.
With the new century an effort was made on fresh lines.
The continuous propaganda had had its effect, even on the
Trades Union Congress. In 1898 it could be suggested in
the presidential address ^ that a " committee should be
appointed to draft a scheme of pohtical organisation for the
Trade Union world on the ground that just as trades federa-
tion is a matter of vital necessity for industrial organisa-
tion, so also will a scheme of pohtical action be of vital
necessity if we wish Parhament to faithfuUy register the
effect of the industrial revolution on our social hfe." The
very next year a resolution — which had been drafted in
^ By J. O'Grady (Furnishing Trades), afterwards M.P. for Leeds;
Annual Report of Trades Union Congress, 1898.
684 Political Organisation
London by the members of the Independent Labour Part}'
— was carried on the motion of the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, against the votes of the miners as well
as of the textile workers, directing the convening of a
special congress representing Trade Unions, Co-operative
Societies, and Socialist organisations, m order to devise
means of increasing the number of Labour members.^ It
was urged on the Parliamentary Committee that the Socialist
organisations had a right to be strongly represented on the
proposed Committee ; and the Parliamentary Committee,
which had no faith in the scheme and attached little import-
ance to it, nominated four of its members (S. Woods, W. C.
Steadman, R. Bell, and W. Thorne), all of whom afterwards
became Members of Parliament, to sit with two representa-
tives each from the Independent Labour Party (Keir Hardie
and J. Ramsay MacDonald), the Fabian Society (G. Bernard
Shaw and E. R. Pease), and the Social Democratic Federa-
tion (H, Quelch and H. R. Taylor). This Committee took
the business into its own hands, and drew up a constitution,
upon a federal basis, for a " Labour Representation Com-
mittee," as an independent organisation, including Trade
Unions and Trades Councils, along with Co-operative and
Socialist Societies ; and in February 1900 a specially sum-
moned congress, attended by 129 delegates, representing
Trade Unions aggregating half a million members, and
^ This was adopted in preference to what was considered a more
extreme proposal (moved by P. Vogcl of the Waiters' Union, a Socialist),
appointing the Trades Union Congress itself the organisation for in-
dependent Labour representation in Parliament ; requiring every Union
to contribute a halfpenny per member per annum, and maWng the
Parliamentary Committee disburse the election expenses and the salaries
of the members returned to the House of Commons {Anvital Report of
Trades Union Congress, 1899).
It was afterwards stated that the leaders of the Trades Union Con-
gress had had in contemplation the subordination of the Labour Repre-
sentation Committee to the Congress. But with a different constituency
the new body had necessarily to be an independent organisation ; and in
1904 the General Purposes Committee reported to the Trades Union
Congress, which endorsed the report, that any resolution to endorse or
amend the constitution of the Labour Representation Committee would
not be in order at the Trades Union Congress {ibid., 190^).
Electoral Progress 685
Socialist societies claiming fewer than seventy thousand,
adopted the draft constitution, established the new body,
appointed its first executive, and gave it, in Mr. J. Ramsaj'
MacDonald, not merely its first secretary but also a skilful
organiser, to whose patient and persistent effort no small
part of its subsequent success has been due.
For two years the Labour Representation Committee, in
spite of diligent propaganda among Trade Union Executives,
seemed to hang fire. The General Election of 1900 found
it unprepared ; and, though it put fifteen candidates in the
field, only two of them were successful. No Co-operative
Society joined ; the Social Democratic Federation withdrew ;
scarcely a score of Trades Councils were enrolled ; and
though sixty-five separate Trade Unions gradually adhered —
being only about five or six per cent of the total number — the
aggregate affiliated membership of the Party did not reach
half a million. Then the tide turned, mainly through the
rally of Trade Unionism as it became aware of the full
implications of the assault upon it made by the decision in
the Taff Vale case, which we have already described. The
miners stood aloof only because they preferred to use their
own organisation. In 1901 the Miners' Federation voted a
levy of a penny per month on all its membership in order
to create a ParUamentary Fund ; and the running of
as many as seventy candidates was then talked about.
During the year 1902 the number of adhering Trade Unions
and Trades Councils, and the total affiliated membership,
were alike practically doubled. In the next two years the
Committee contested no fewer than six Parliamentary by-
elections, returning its members in half of them.^ Mean-
while the Conservative Government obstinately refused to
allow legislation restoring to Trade Unions the statutory
^ D. J. (afterwards Sir David) Shackleton {Lancashire Weavers) was
allowed a walk-over at Clitheroe in 1902 ; and in 1903 W. (afterwards
the Rt. Honourable W.) Crooks (Coopers) carried Woolwich after an
exciting contest, and Arthur (afterwards the Rt. Honourable Arthur)
Henderson (Friendly Society of Ironfounders) won Barnard Castle in a
three-cornered fight.
686 Political Organisation
status of 1871-76, of which the judges' decision in the Taff
Vale case had deprived them. Careful preparation was
accordingly made for a successful appeal to Trade Unionists
at the General Election which was approaching ; and when
it came, in January 1906, no fewer than fifty independent
Labour candidates were put in the field against Liberals and
Conservatives aUke. To the general surprise of the poUtical
world, as many as twenty-nine of these were successful ;
besides a dozen other workmen, mostly miners, who again
stood with Liberal Party support and were still regarded as
belonging to that Party. The twenty-nine at once formed
themselves into, and were recognised as, a separate inde-
pendent party in the House of Commons, v/ith its own
officers and whips, concerned to push its own programme
irrespective of the desires and convenience of the other
political parties. At the same time the Labour Representa-
tion Committee changed its name to the Labour Party
We need not concern ourselves with the Parliamentary
struggles of the next three years, during which the Parlia-
mentary Labour Party may claim to have indirectly secured
the passage, as Government measures, of the Trade Disputes
Act, the Miners' Eight Hours Act, and the Trade Boards
Act, and to have developed something like a Parliamentary
programme. It suffered, however, in the Trade Union
world, from its inevitable failure to impress its will on the
triumphant Liberal majority of these years. What saved
the Labour Party from decline, and gave it indeed fresh
impetus in the Trade Union movement, was the renewed
legal assault on Trade Unionism itself, which in 1909, as we
have described, culminated in the Osborne Judgement of
the highest Appeal Court, by which the Trade Unions were
prohibited from applying any of their funds to political
activities and to the support of the Labour Party in par-
ticular. The refusal of the Liberal Government for four
whole years to remedy this gross miscarriage of justice
though conscious that it was not permanently defensible ;
and the unconcealed desire of the Liberal Party pohticians
\
The Act of igij 687
to put the Labour Party out of action as an independent
political force, swung over to its side the great bulk of
active Trade Unionists, including many, especially in Lanca-
shire, who had hitherto counted to the Conservative Party.
By 1913, in spite of a large number of injunctions restraining
Trade Unions from affiUating, the Labour Party could count
on a membership of nearly two millions, and this number
has since steadily grown. The two General Elections of 1910,
though dominated by other issues, left the Parhamentary
Labour Party unshaken ; whilst the accession to the Party
of the Miners' members raised its Parliamentary strength to
forty-two. Payment of members was secured in 1911, and
the Mines (Minimum Wage) Act in 1912, but not until
1913 could the Government be mduced to pass into law the
Trade Union Act, which once more permitted Trade Unions
to engage in any lawful purposes that their members desired.
This concession was, even then, made subject to any ob-
jecting member being enabled to withhold that part of his
contribution applicable to poHtical purposes — an illogical
restriction, because it appUed only to the dissentient's tiny
fraction of money, and he was not empowered to prevent
the majority of members from using the indivisible corporate
power of the Union itself. This restriction, not put upon
any other corporate body, was universally believed to have
been imposed, in the assumed interest of the Liberal Party,
with the object of crippling the pohtical influence of Trade
Unionism ; and is still bitterly resented. ^
Whilst it was very largely the successive assaults on
Trade Unionism itself that built up the Labour Party, the
ultimate defeat of these assaults, the concession of Pa3rment
of Members, and the attainment of legal security by the
Trade Union Act of 1913, did nothing to stay its progress.
^ In some Unions outside influence, notably that of the railway com-
panies, went to the expense of printing and distributing hundreds of
thousands of forms by which dissentient members could claim exemption
from the tiny " pohtical " contribution ; and in the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Servants, in particular, thousands of such claims were made.
The number has now greatly diminished (1920).
688 Political Organisation
At the same time, the injunctions of the years 1909-12, and
the fear of htigation, together with a certain disilhisionment
with Parhamentary action among the rank and file, led to
the gradual falling away of some Trade Unions, mostly of
comparatively small membership. The very basis of the
Labour Party, upon which alone it has proved possible to
build up a successful political force — the combination, within
a political federation, of Trade Unions having extensive
membership and not very intense political energy, and
Socialist societies of relatively scanty membership but over-
flowing with political talent and zeal — necessarily led to
complications. It needed all the tact and patient persuasion
of the leaders of both sections to convince the Socialists
that their ideals and projects were not being sacrificed to
the stolidity and the prejudices of the mass of Trade
Unionists ; and at the same time to explain to the Trade
Unionists how valuable was the aid of the knowledge,
eloquence, and Parliamentary ability contributed by such
Socialist representatives as Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden,
J. Ramsay MacDonald, and W, C. Anderson. Moreover,
the complications and difficulties of Parliamentary action
in a House of Commons where th^ Government continuously
possessed a solid majority ; the political necessity of sup-
porting the Liberal Party Bills relating to the Budget and
the House of Lords, and of not playing into the hands of a
still more reactionary Front Opposition Bench, were not
readily comprehended by the average workman. WTiat .the
militants in the country failed to allow for was tlie impotence
of a small Parliamentary section to secure the adoption of
its own policy by a Parliamentary majority. But it is, we
think, now admitted that it was a misfortune that the
Parliamentary Labour Party of these years never managed
to put before the country the large outlines of an alternative
programme based on the Part3''s conception of a new social
order, eliminating the capitaUst profit-maker wherever
possible, and giving free scope to communal and industrial
Democracy — notably with regard to the administration of
" The Daily Citizen " 689
the railways and the mines, the prevention of Unemployment,
and also the provision for the nation's non-effectives, which
the Government dealt with so unsatisfactorily in the
National Insurance Act of 191 1. The failure of the Parlia-
mentary Labour Party between 1910 and 1914 to strike the
imagination of the Trade Union world led to a certain
reaction against poHtical action as such, and to a growing
doubt among the active spirits as to the value of a Labour
Party which did not succeed in taking vigorous independent
action, either in Parliament or on the platform and in the
press, along the lines of changing the existing order of
society. A like failure to strike the imagination charac-
terised The Daily Citizen— the organ which the Labour
Party and the Trade Union Movement had estabhshed with
such high hopes — and its inabihty to gain either intellectual
influence or adequate circulation did not lighten the some-
what gloomy atmosphere of the Labour Part}^ councils of
1913-14.1 This reaction did not appreciably affecN; the
numerical and financial strength of the Labour Party itself,
as the relatively few withdrawals of Unions were outweighed
by the steady increase in membership of the hundred
principal Unions which remained faithful, by the accession
^ The Daily Citizen was started by a separate limited company, in
which the control was permanently secured to representatives of the Trade
Unions and the Labour Party, on November Sj 1912. The total capital
raised from the Trade Unions from first to last was approximately
;^2oo,ooo. This important journalistic venture, starting under good
auspices, met with untoward circumstances. It was crippled by a legal
decision that Trade Unions had no power to subscribe to its cost, or even
to make investments in its shares (an inference from the Osborne Judge-
ment, which was reversed by the Trade Union Act of 191 3, subject to
compliance with the conditions as to political expenditure). Before this
set back could be got over, the outbreak of war upset all financial calcula-
tions, and made the conduct of a newspaper increasingly onerous. The
paper stopped on June 5, 1915, and the company was wound up, all
creditors being paid in full, but the shareholders losing practically aU that
they had ventured. The failure was a serious blow to the Labour Party,
which has been badly in want of a daily newspaper — a lack supplied in
1919 by the energetic and adventurous Daily Herald, which, under the
direction of Mr. George Lansbury, has drawn to itself an unusual amount
of talent, and now needs only whole-hearted support from the Trade
Unions.
690 Political Organisation
of other Unions, and by the continual increase in the number
and strength of the affiliated Trades Councils and Local
Labour Parties. But the reaction in Trade Union opinion
weakened the influence of the members of the Parliamentary
Party, dike in the House of Commons and in their own
societies. A wave of " Labour Unrest," of " Syndicalism,"
of " rank and file movements " for a more aggressive Trade
Unionism, of organisation by " shop stewards " in opposi-
tion to national executives, and of preference for " Direct
Action " over Parliamentary procedure swept over British
Trade Unionism, affecting especially the London building
trades, the South Wales Miners, and the engineering and
shipbuilding industry on the Clyde. The impetuous strikes
in 1911-13 of the Railwaymen, the Coal-miners, the Trans-
port Workers, and the London Building Trades, which we
have already described, were influenced, partl3^ by this new
spirit. The number of disputes reported to the Labour
Department, which had sunk in 1908 to only 399, rose in
1911 to 903, and culminated in the latter half of 1913 and
the first half of 19 14 in the outbreak of something hke a
hundred and fifty strikes per month. British Trade Union-
ism was, in fact, in the summer of 1914, working up for an
almost revolutionary outburst of gigantic industrial disputes,
which could not have failed to be seriously embarrassing
for the political organisation to which the movement had
committed itself, when, in August 1914, war was declared,
and all internal conflict had perforce to be suspended.
During the war (1914-18) the task of the Labour Party
was one of exceptional difficulty. It had necessarily to
support the Government in a struggle of which five-sixths of
its Parliamentary representatives and probably nine-tentlis
of its aggregate membership approved. The very gra\ity
of the national crisis compelled the Party to abstain from
any action that would have weakened the country's defence.
On the otlier hand, the three successive Administrations
that held office during the war were all driven by their needs,
as we have already described, to impose upon the wage-
Trade Union Criticism 691
earners cruel sacrifices, and to violate, not once but repeat-
edly, all that Organised Labour in Britain held dear. The
Party could not refrain, at whatever cost of misconstruction,
from withstanding unjustifiable demands by the Govern-
ment ; ^ protesting against its successive breaches of faith
to the Trade Unions ; demanding the conditions in the
forthcommg Treaty of Peace that, as could be already
foreseen, would be necessary to protect the wage-earning
class ; standing up for the scandalously ill-used " conscien-
tious objectors," and doing its best to secure, in the eventual
demobihsation and social reconstruction, the utmost possible
protection of the mass of the people against Unemployment
and " Profiteering." In all this the Labour Party earned
the respect of the most thoughtful Trade Unionists, but
necessarily exposed itself to a constant stream of newspaper
misrepresentation and abuse. Any opposition or resistance
to the official demands was inevitably misrepresented as,
and mistaken for, an almost treasonable " Pacifism " or
" Defeatism " — a misunderstanding of the attitude of the
Party to which colour was lent by the persistence and
eloquence with which the small Pacifist Minority within the
^ It w£is, for instance, only the determined private resistance of the
Trade Unionist leaders of the Labour Party that compelled the Govern-
ment to abandon its project of introducing several hundred thousand
Chinese labourers into Great Britain ; a project which, if carried out,
not only might have been calamitous in its effect upon the Standard of
Life of the British workman — not to mention other evil consequences —
but would almost certainly have also led to a Labour revolt against the
continuance of the war. In this connection may be noted the valuable
work done throughout the war, not in the interests of Trade Unionism
only, but in those of the wage-earning class, and of the community as a
whole, by the War Emergency Workers' National Committee (J. S.
Middleton, Honorary Secretary), a body which included representatives
not only of the Parliamentary Committee, Labour Party, and General
Federation, but also of the Co-operative Union, the National Union of
Teachers, and other organisations. The valuable though often unwelcome
assistance which this Committee gave to the Government by insisting on
the redress of grievances that officialdom would have ignored, and by its
working out of policy and persistence in agitation on such matters as
pensions, limitation of prices, food-rationing, rent restriction, and other
subjects, on which its publications had marked results, deserve the atten-
tion of the historian.
692 Political Organisation
Party — a minority which, it must be said, included some
of the most talented and active of its leading members in
the House of Commons — used every opportunity pubUcly
to denounce the Government's conduct in the war. But
although the Pacifist Group in Parliament was strenuously
supported in the country by the relatively small but
extremely active constituent society of the Labour Party
styled The Independent Labour Party — the very name
helping the popular misunderstanding — the Trade Unionists,
forming the vast majority of the Labour Party, remained,
with extremely few exceptions, grimly determined at all
costs to win the war.
If Organised Labour had been against the war, it is safe
to say that the national effort could not have been main-
tained. The need for the formal association of the Labour
Party with the Administration was recognised by Mr.
Asquith in 1915, when he formed the first Coalition Cabinet,
into which he invited the chairman of the Parliamentary'
Labour Party, Mr. Arthur Henderson (Friendly Society of
Ironfounders), who became President of the Board of
Education. Later on, in 1916, Mr. G. N. Barnes (Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers) was appointed to the new
office of Minister of Pensions. When, in December 1916,
Mr. Asquith resigned, and Mr. Lloyd George formed a new
Coalition Government, Mr. Henderson entered the small
War Cabinet that was then formed, with the nominal office
of Paymaster-General ; whilst Mr. Barnes continued
Minister of Pensions, Mr. John Hodge (British Steel
Smelters' Society) was appointed to the new office of
Minister of Labour, and three other members of the Party
(Mr. W. Brace, South Wales Miners ; Mr. G. H. Roberts,
Typographical Society ; and Mr. James Parker, National
Union of General Workers) received minor ministerial posts. ^
Throughout the whole period of the war all the several
^ Subsequently Mr. J. R. Clynes (National Union of General Workers)
was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Food ; and ou
Lord Rhondda's death he succeeded him as Minister of Food.
Trade Union Support 693
demands of the Government upon the organised workers,
the abrogation of " Trade Union Conditions " in all in-
dustries working for war needs, the first and second Munitions
of War Acts, the subversion of individual liberty by the
successive orders under the Defence of the Realm Acts, the
successive applications of the Mihtary Service Acts, the
imposition of what was practically Compulsory Arbitration
to settle the rates of wages — were accepted, though only
after serious protest, by large majorities at the various
Conferences of the Labour Party, as well as by the various
annual Trades Union Congresses,^ in spite of the resistance
of minorities, including more than " pacifists." The entry
of Mr. Henderson into Mr. Asquith's first CoaHtion Govern-
ment, and that of Mr. Barnes into Mr. Lloyd George's
War Cabinet, together with the acceptance of ministerial office
by other leading members of the Labour Party — though
any such ministerial coahtion was in flagrant violation of
the very principles of its existence, and was strenuously com-
bated on grounds of expediency by many of its members
who loyally supported the war — equalty received the endorse-
ment of large majorities at the Party Conferences. From
the beginning of the war to the end, the Labour Party,
alike in all its corporate acts and by the individual efforts of
its leading members (other than the minority already men-
tioned), stuck at nothing in its determination to help the
Government to win the war.
More controversial were the persistent efforts made by
the Labour Party to maintain its international relations
with the Labour and Sociahst Movements of Continental
Europe. From the first it was seen to be important to get
the representatives of the Trade Unions and Socialist
organisations of the AUied Nations, and not merely their
Governments, united in a declaration of the aims and the
justification of a war that was eve^^-^vhere outraging
working-class ideahsm. Such a unanimity was success-
1 See the printed reports of Labour Party Conferences and Trades
Union Congresses, 1914-19.
694 Political Organisation
fully achieved in February 1915 at a conference, held in
London at tlie instance of the Labour Party, of delegates
from the working-class organisations of France, Belgium,
and Great Britain, with Russian representatives, then allied
in arms against the Central Empires.^ Later on, when a
Minority Party had been formed among the German
Socialists, and when the Austrian and Hungarian working-
class Movements were also in revolt against the militarism of
their Government, repeated efforts were made by the Labour
Party to encourage this revolt, and for this purpose to obtain
the necessary Government facilities for a meeting, in some
neutral city, of the working-class " International," at which
the Allied Case could be laid before the neutrals, and a basis
found for united action with all the working-class elements
in opposition to the dominant military Imperialism. After
the Russian revolution of March 1917, the Petrograd Work-
men's and Soldiers' Council actually issued an invitation for
a working-class " International " at Stockholm ; and the
participation of the British Labour Party in this Inter-
national Congress, which was not then favoured by Mr.
Henderson, received at one time no small support from the
Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George. In the end the Govern-
ment despatched Mr. Henderson on an official mission to
Petrograd (incidentally empowering him, if he thought fit,
to remain there as Ambassador at £8000 a year). Mean-
while the proposal for an International Congress had been
modified, first into one for a purely consultative gathering,
and then into one for a series of separate interviews between
a committee of neutrals and the representatives of each of
the belligerents in turn, with a view to discovering a possible
basis for peace — a project to which Mr. Henderson, from
what he learnt at Petrograd, was converted. A National
Conference of the Labour Party in August 1917 approved
of participation in such a Congress at Stockholm ; but
the French and Italian Governments would not hear of it,
* Report of the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labour Conference, February
15. 1915-
Inter- Allied Conferences 695
and Mr. Llo^'d George went back on his prior approval,
absolutely declining to allow passports to be issued. Amid
great excitement, and under circumstances of insult and
indignity which created resentment among the British
working class, Mr. Henderson felt obliged to tender his
resignation of his place in the War Cabinet, in which he was
succeeded by Mr. Barnes, who was getting more and more
out of sympathy with the majority of the Party. ^ The
Labour Party Executive, in alliance with the Parliamentary
Committee of the Trades Union Congress, then applied
itself to getting agreement among the Labour and Socialist
Movements of the Allied Nations as to the lines on which
— assuming,an Allied victory — the terms of peace should be
drawn, in order to avert as much as possible of the wide-
spread misery which, it could be foreseen, must necessarily
fall upon the wage-earning class. In this effort, in which
Mr. Henderson displayed great tact and' patience, he had the
implicit iidnction of the British Government, and, with some
reluctance, also of the Governments of the other Allied
Nations by whom the necessary passports were issued for an
Inter- Allied Conference in London in August 1917, which was
abortive ; for provisional discussions at Paris in February
1918 ; and for a second Inter-AlUed Conference at the end of
the same month in London, which resulted in a virtually
unanimous agreement upon what should be the terms of
peace,^ on a basis already approved on December 28,
1917, by a Joint Conference of the Trades Union Congress
and the Labour Party, and widely published all over the
world. The terms thus agreed were, in fact, immediately
adopted in outline in a public deliverance by Mr. Lloyd
George as those on which Germany could have peace at any
time ; and the same proposals were promptly made the
basis of President Wilson's celebrated " Fourteen Points "
^ Mr. Hodge succeeded to Mr. Barnes as Minister of Pensions, Mr.
Roberts to Mr. Hodge as Minister of Labour, and Mr. G. J. Wardle (National
Union of Railwaymen) to Mr. Roberts as Parliamentary Secretary of the
Board of Trade.
^ Memorandum on War Aims (Labour Party), February 1918.
696 . Political Organisation
on which eventually (but only after another ten months'
costly war) the Armistice of November 11, 1918, was con-
cluded. Profound was the disappointment, and bitter the
resentment, of the greater part of the organised Labour
Movement of Great Britain when it was revealed how
seriously the diplomatists at the Paris Conference had
departed from these terms in the Treaty of Peace which was
imposed on the Central Empires.^
We have already attempted to sum up the effect of the
Great War on the industrial status of Trade Unionism. It
is more difficult to estimate its effect on the poUtical organisa-
tion of the movement. The outbreak of the war had
found the Labour Party, in the see-saw of Trade Union
opinion to which we have elsewhere referred, suffering from
an inevitable disillusionmxcnt among Trade Unionists as to
the immediate potency of Parliamentary representation — a
disillusionment manifested in the outbreak of rebellious
^ It is difficult not to be struck with the greater breadth of vision,
the higher ideaUsm, and (as we venture to say) the larger statesmanship
of the Labour Party in its projects and proposals for the resettlement of
the world after the Great War, compared with those which the statesmen
and diplomatists of the capitahst parties of Great Britain, France, Italy,
and, as we grieve to say, also the United States, with the acquiescence of
deliberately inflamed popular electorates, succeeded in embodying in the
• Treaty of Peace. Apart from the indefensible redistributions of pohtical
sovereignt)^ not essentially differing in spirit from those of the Congress
of Vienna in 1814-15 (and probably less stable even than these), against
which Labour opinion had strongly protested in advance, it is impossible
not to regret the failure to incorporate in the Treaty the proposals, for which
the Labour Party had secured the support of the organised working-class
apinion of the world, for (i.) the universal abandonment of discrimina-
tory liscal barriers to international trade ; (ii.) the administration of
Colonial possessions exclusively in the interest of the local inhabitants,
and on the basis of equality of opportunity for traders of all nations ;
(iii.) concerted international control of the exportable surplus of materials
and food-stuffs of all the several countries, so as to mitigate, as far as
possible, in the general world -shortage which the Labour l^arty foresaw,
the inevitable widespread starvation in the most necessitous areas, whether
enemy, allied, or neutral ; (iv.) deliberate Government action in each
country for the prevention of unemployment, instead of letting it occur
and then merely relieving the imemployed. In questions of foreign
policy the Labour Party, inspired by its ideahsm, has shown itself at its
best, iosicad of this department of politics being, as is often ignorantly
assumed, altogether beyond its capacity.
Labour and the New Social Order 697
strikes that characterised the years 1911-14. The achieve-
ments of the Labour Party in the Hoiise of Commons had
fallen short of the eager hopes with which the new party
had raised its standard on its triumphant entry in 1906.
In 19 14, it may be said, the Labour Party was at a dead
point. The effect upon it of the Great War was to raise
it in proportion to the height of the vastly greater
issues with which it was compelled to deal. Amid the
stress of war, and of the intensely controversial decisions
which it had necessarily to take, the Labour Party revised
its constitution, widened its aims, opened its ranks to the
" workers by brain " as well as the workers by hand, and
received the accession of many thousands of converts from
the Liberal and Conservative Parties. It made great pro-
gress in its difficult task of superimposing, on an organisa-
tion based on national societies, the necessary complementary
organisation of its affiliated membership by geographical
constituencies. It equipped itself during the war, for the
first time, with a far-reaching and well-considered programme
not confined to distinctively " Labour " issues, but covering
the whole field of home politics, and even extending to
foreign relations.^ The formulation of such a programme,
^ The new constitution and enlarged programme which the Labour
Party adopted at its Conferences of 1917-18, after six months' considera-
tion and discussion by the constituent organisations, were httle more
than a ratification for general adoption of what had become the practice
of particular districts. Thus, the more active Local Labour Parties, such
as those of Woolwich and Blackburn, had long welcomed the adhesion of
supporters who were not manual workers. The successive annual Con-
ferences had passed resolutions which, taken together, amounted to a
prettj' complete programme of constructive legislation, wholly Collectivist
in principle. Hence the deliberate and formal opening of the Party,
through the Local Labour Parties, to " workers by brain " as well a^
" workers by hand " ; and the explicit adoption, as a programme, of
Labour and the New Social Order were not such innovations as the news-
papers made out and as the public generally supposed. But they created
a sensation, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States
and in the British Dominions ; and they led to a considerable accession
of membership, largely from the professional and middle classes, which
was steadily increased as the unsatisfactory character of the Treaty of
Peace, the continued " militarism " of the Government, and the aggression
of a " Protectionist ' capitalism became manifest.
698 Political Organisation
from beginning to end essentially Socialist in character, and
including alike ideals of social reconstruction and detailed
reforms of immediate practicability, together with the whole-
hearted adoption of this programme, after six months' con-
sideration by the constituent societies and branches, was a
notable achievement, which placed the British Labour Party
ahead of those of other countries. Moreover, the formula-
tion of a comprehensive social programme and of " terms
of Peace," based on the principles for which the war had
ostensibly been fought — principles which were certainly not
carried in the Treaty of Peace — transformed the Labour
Party from a group representing merely the class interests
of the manual workers into a fully constituted political
Party of national scope, ready to take over the government
of the country and to conduct both home and foreign affairs
on definite principles. Taken together with the intellectual
bankruptcy of the Liberal Party and its apparent incapacity
to formulate any positive policy, whether with regard to
the redistribution of wealth within our own community or
with regard to our attitude towards other races within or
without the British Empire, the emergence of the Labour
Party programme meant that the Party stood forth, in
pubUc opinion, as the inevitable alternative to the present
Coalition Government when the time came for this to fall.
The result was that, aided bj^ the steady growth of Trade
Unionism, the Party came near, between 1914 and 1919,
to doubling its aggregate membership. When hostilities
ceased, it insisted on resuming the complete independence
of the other political parties, which it had, by joining the
successive Coalition Governments, consented temporarily to
forgo ; and such of its leaders as refused to withdraw
from ministerial office ^ were imhesitatiiigly shed from the
Party. Meanwhile, the extension of the franchise and
redistribution of seats, which had been carried by general
consent in the spring of 1918, turned out to raise the
^ Messrs. Barnes, Roberts (who became Minister of Food), Paxker, and
Wardle.
The Election of igi8 , 699
electorate to nearly treble that of -1910, whilst the new
constituencies proved to have been so adjusted as greatly
to facilitate an increase in the number of miners' representa-
tives. When the General Election came, in December 1918,
though the Labour Party fought under great disadvantages
and it was seen that most of the soldier electors would be
unable to record their votes, it put no fewer than 361 Labour
candidates in the field against Liberal and Conservative
ahke, contesting two-thirds of all the constituencies in Great
Britain. In face of a " Lloyd George tide " of unprecedented
strength these Labour candidates received nearly one-fourth
of all the votes polled in the United Kingdom ; and though
five-sixths of these numerous Labour candidatures were
unsuccessful (including, unfortunately, most of its ablest
Parliamentarians such as Messrs. Henderson, ^ MacDonald,
x\nderson, and Snowden), the Party increased its numerical
strength in the House of Commons by 50 per cent, and, to
the universal surprise, returned more than twice as many
members as did the remnant of the Liberal Party adhering
to Mr. Asquith — becoming, in fact, entitled to the positiop
of " His Majesty's Opposition."
It can hardly be said that during the session of 1919
the Parliamentary Labour Party, considerably strengthened
in numbers but weakened by the defeat of its ablest Parha-
mentarians, has, under the leadership of the Right Honour-
able W. Adamson (Scottish Miners), made as much of its
opportunities as the Labour Party in the country expected
and desired. The political organisation of the Trade Union
world remains, indeed, very far from adequate to the
achievement of its far-reaching aims. It is not merely that
the average British Trade Unionist, unlike the German, the
Danish, Swedish, or the Belgian, has learnt so Uttle the
duty of subordinating minor personal or local issues, and
of voting with his Party with as much loyalty as he shows
in striking with his fellow-unionists, that by no means all
^ Mr. Henderson was re-elected to Parliament in 1919 at a bye-election,
capturing a strong Conservative seat at Widnes (Lancashire).
700 Political Organisation
the aggregate British Trade Union membership can stead-
fastly be relied on to vote for the Labour candidates.
Nor is it only that the British Labour Party still fails to
command the affiliation of as many Trade Unions as the
Trades Union Congress, and that the great majoritj'' of the
smaller and the local societies — less from dissent than out
of apathy — remain aloof from both sides of the national
organisation. The Trades Union Congress itself, after en-
gendering, as independent organisations, first the General
Federation of Trade Unions, and then the Labour Part}',
has not yet resigned itself to limiting its activities. The
General Federation of Trade Unions may be said, indeed,
to have now disappeared from the Trade Union world as
an effective force in the determination of industrial or
political polic}^ There remain three separate organisations
of national scope : the Parliamentary Committee of the
Trades Union Congress which it is now proposed to trans-
form into a General Council, the Executive Committee of the
Labour Party, and the members of the House of Commons
who form the Parliamentary Labour Party. Unfortunately,
between these three groups there has been some lack of
mutual consultation, and an indefiniteness if not a confu-
sion of policy which stands in the way of effective leadership.^
This has prevented the bringing to bear upon the poHtical
field of the full force, now almost a moiety of the whole
registered electorate of Great /Britain, that the Trade
Union world may (including the wives of Trade Unionist
electors) fairly claim to include. Fundamentally, however,
the shortcomings of the political organisation of the Trade
Union world are to be ascribed to its failure, down to tlie
present, to develop a staff of trained pohtical officers at
all equal to those of the Trade Union organisers and Trade
Union negotiators in tlic industrial field. The Labour
^ A "Joint Board " — from which the General Federation of Trade
Unions was afterwards excj'ided - and, later on, joint meetings of tlie
Parliamentary Conunittec of the Trades Union Congress and the Kxccutivo
Committee of the Labour Party, did something to remove friction.
The Labour Members 701
Party, which can as 3'et rely only on the quite inadequate
contribution from its affiliated societies of no more than
twopence per member annually, has, so far, not succeeded
in obtaining and keeping the services, as Registration
Officers and Election Agents, of anything like so extensive
and so competent a staff as either of the other political
parties ; and Labour Party candidatures are still run,
occasionall}^ with astonishing success, very largely upon
that transient enthusiasm of the crowd upon which experi-
enced electioneers wisely decHne to rely for victory. MTiat
is, however, much more cripphng to the Labour Part}^ than
the scanty funds with which its constituent societies supply
it, and this insufficienc}' in the staff of trained election
organisers, is the scarcity of trained Parliamentary represent-
atives. Down to to-day the great bulk of Labour Members
of Parliament have been drawn from the ranks of the
salaried secretaries and other industrial officers of Trade
Unions, who are nearly always not only men of competence
in their own spheres, but also exceptionally good speakers
for popular audiences, and, generally, in many respects
above the average of middle-class candidates. But as
Members of Parliament they have serious shortcomings.
They can, to begin with, seldom devote the necessary time
to their new duties. They usually find themselves com-
pelled to strive to combine attendance at the House of
Commons with the onerous industrial service of their
societies. The Trade Unions have, as yet, only in a few
cases reaUsed the necessity of setting free from the constant
burden of Trade Union work — as they might by promotion
to some such consultative office as that of a salaried President
— such of their officials as secure election to Parliament ;
whilst these officers, unable to maintain themselves and
their families in London on their Parliamentary allowance
for expenses of £400 a year, and afraid lest the loss of their
seats may presently leave them without incomes, dare not
resign their Trade Union posts. The result is an imperfect
and always uncertain attendance of the Labour Members at
702 Political Organisation
the House of Commons ; a fatal division and diversion of
their attention ; and an inevitable failure on their part to
discharge with the fullest efficiency the duties of their two
offices. Equally destnictive of ParUamentary efficiency is
the omission of the Trade Union world to provide or secure
any training in the duties of a Member of Parliament for
those whom they select as candidates and whose election
expenses they defra}'' with unstinted liberaUty. The life-
long training which these candidates have enjoyed as Branch
and District Secretaries, as industrial organisers and nego-
tiators, ajid as administrators of great Trade Unions, valuable
as it is for Trade Union purposes, does not include, and indeed
tends rather to exclude, the practical training in general
poUtics, the working' acquaintance with the British Con-
stitution, the knowledge of how to use and how to control
the adroit and well-equipped Civil Service, and the ability
to translate both the half-articulate desires of the electorate
to the House of Commons, and the advice of the political
expert to the electorate, which, coupled with the general
art of " Parliamentarianism," constitutes the equipment of
the really efficient Member of the House of Commons. Add
to this that the very training which the life of the successful
Trade Union official has given him, his perpetual struggle
to rise in his vocation in competitive rivalry, not with
persons of opposite views but actually with personal
acquaintances of the same craft and the same political
opinions as himself, is, in itself, not a good preparation for
the incessant mutual consultation and carefully planned
" team-work " which contributes so much to the effective-
ness of a minorit}' party in the House of Commons. Add
to this again the personal rivalries among members of the
Party, the jealousies from which no party is free, and
the almost complete lack of opportunity for the constant
social intercourse with each other away from the House of
Commons that the members of the other parties enjoy — and
it will be realised how seriously the Parliamentary Labour
Party is handicapped by being made up, as it is at present,
Local Government 703
almost entirely of men who are compelled also to serve as
Trade Union officials. Already, however, there are signs
of improvement. Some Trade Unions, whilst wilhng to
spend large smns on Parliamentan,'- candidatures, are
demurring to their salaried officials going to Westminster,
The Workers' Educational Association, Ruskin College, and
other educational agencies are doing much to provide a
wider political training than Trade Unionists have hereto-
fore enjoj^ed. And as the Parliamentary Labour Party,
claiming to-day to represent, not the Trade Unionists only,
but the whole community of " workers by hand or by brain,"
expands from sixty to four or six times that number —
as it must before it can be confronted with the task of
forming a Government — it will necessarily come to include
an ever-increasing proportion of members dravvn from other
than Trade Union ranks ; whilst even its Trade Union
members cannot fail to acquire more of that habit of mutual
intercourse and that art of combined action which, coupled
with the Parliamentary skill and capacity for public ad-
ministration of those who rise to leadership, is the necessary
basis of successful party achievement.
Meanwhile, the political organisa^tion of the Trade Union
Movement, and the enlargement of its ideas on Communal
and Industrial Democracy, have been manifesting them-
selves also in the important sphere of Local Government.
After the " Labour " successes at the elections of Local
Authorities, which continued for a -whole decade from 1892,
and placed over a thousand Trade Unionists and Socialists
on Parish, District, Borough and County Councils, there
ensued another decade in which, in the majority of districts,
this active participation in local elections was impaired by
the diversion of interest, both to Parliament and to indus-
trial organisation. From 1914 to 1919 local elections were
suspended. On their resumption in the latter year, they
were energetically contested by the Labour Party, all over
Great Britain, on its new and definitely Socialist programme,
with the unexpected result that, up and down the country.
704 Political Organisation
the Labour candidates frequently swept the board, polhng
in the aggregate a very substantial proportion of the votes,
electing altogether several thousand Councillors (five or six
hundred in Scotland alone), and being returned in actual
majorities in nearly half the Metropolitan Boroughs, several
important Counties and Municipalities, and many Urban
Districts and Parishes.
It must be apparent that any history of Trade Unionism
that breaks off at the beginning of 1920 halts, not at the
end of an epoch, but — we may almost say — at the opening
of a new chapter. British Trade Unionism, at a moment
when it is, both industrially and politically, stronger than
ever before, is seething with new ideas and far-reaching
aspirations. At the same time, its most recent advances in
status and power are by no means yet accepted by what
remains the governing class ; its political and industrial
position is still precarious, and within a very brief space it
may again find itself fighting against a frontal attack iipon
its very existence. And in face of the common enemy —
now united as an autocratic capitalism — Industrial Demo-
cracy is uncertain of itself, and almost blindly groping after
a precise adjustment of powers and functions between
Associations of Producers and Associations of Consumers.
Let us elaborate these points in detail. One result of
the Great War has been, if not the actual enthronement of
Democracy, a tremendous shifting of authority to the mass
of the people. Of this shifting of the basis of power the
advance in the status of Trade Unionism and the advent,
Democracy 705
in British politics, of the Labour Party, are but prehminary
manifestations. As yet the mass of the people, to whom
power is passing, have made but little effective use of their
opportunities. At least seven-eighths of the nation's accumu-
lated wealth, and with it nearly all the effective authority,
is still in the hands of one-eighth of the population ; and
the seven-eighths of the people find themselves in conse-
quence still restricted, as regards the means of hfe, to less
than half of that national income which is exclusively the
product of those who labour by hand or by brain. The
" leisure class " — the men and women who Uve by owning
and not by working, a class increasing in actual numbers,
if not relatively to the workers — seem to the great mass of
working people to be showing themselves, if possible, more
frivolous and more insolent in their irresponsible consump-
tion, by themselves and their families, of the relatively
enormous share that they are able to take from the national
income. It is coming to be more and more felt that the
continued existence of this class involves a quite unwarranted
burden upon their fellow-citizens working by hand or by
brain. Very naturally there is widespread discontent, and
the emergence of all sorts of exasperated criticisms and
extravagant schemes.
The truth is, of course, that Democracy, whether pohtical
or industrial, is still in its infancy. The common run of
men and women, who have only just been enfranchised
politically, and are even yet only partially organised in-
dustrially, are as yet unable to make full use of Democratic
institutions. The majority of them cannot be induced, in
the economic pressure to which Capitahsm subjects them,
to take the trouble or give the continuous thought involved
in any effective participation in public affairs. The result
is that such Democratic institutions as we possess are, of
necessity, still inefficiently managed ; and neither the
citizen-consumers nor the Trade Unionist producers find
themselves exercising much effective control over their own
lives. The active-minded minority sees itself submerged
2 A
7o6 Political Organisation
by the " apathetic mass " ; the individual feels enslaved by
the " machine." The complaint of the " rank and file " —
using that term to mean, not any " extremist " minority,
but merely the majority, the " common run of men " —
comes to no more than that they do not find themselves
obtaining the results in their daily lives which they expected,
and which they were, as they understood, promised. This,
we think, is the explanation of the perpetual " see-saw "
within the Labour Movement, decade after decade, between
an infatuation for industrial or " direct " action and an
equal infatuation for political or Parliamentary and Muni-
cipal action — each, unfortunately, to the temporary neglect
of the other. Or to state the Democratic problem in a more
fundamental form, the see-saw is between the aspiration
to vest the control over the instruments of production in
Democracies of Producers, and the alternating belief that
this control can best be vested in Democracies of Consumers.
But it is abundantly clear, alike from history and economic
analysis, that in any genuine Democracy both forms of
organisation are indispensably required. In the modern
State every person throughout his whole life consumes a
great variety of commodities and services which he cannot
produce ; whilst men and women, occupied in production,
habitually produce a single commodity or service for other
persons to consume. Their interests and desires as
producers, and as producers of a single commodity or
service, are not, and can never be, identical with the interests
and desires of these same people as consumers of many
different commodities and services — just as their interests
and desires as citizens of a community, or as members of a
race which they wish to continue in independent existence,
are not necessarily identical with those of which they are
conscious either as producers or as consumers.
It is, in fact, now realised that Democratic organisation
involves the acceptance, not of a single basis — that of the
undifferentiated human being — but of various separate and
distinct bases : man as a producer ; man as a consumer ;
Associations of Producers 707
man as a citizen concerned \vith the continued existence
and independence of his race or community ; possibly also
other bases, such as man as a scientist or man as a rehgious
believer. What is wrong in each successive generation is
the intolerant fanaticism of the enthusiasts which leads
them to insist on any one form of this multiplex Democracy
to the exclusion of the other forms. We see to-day upper-
most a revival of faith in Associations of Producers, as
being, in an industrial community, the form of Democratic
organisation most important to the working people. To
some one-sided minds, as was inevitable, the all-embracing
Association of Producers seems the only form that Demo-
cratic organisation can validly take. Interesting to the
historian is the intellectual connection of this revival with
the previous manifestations, in the Trade Union Movement,
of the idea of " Co-operative Production," whether in the
revolutionary Owenism of 1830-34, the Christian Socialism
of 1848-52, or the experiments of particular Unions in 1872.
As we have explained, the Trade Union, being essentially an
Association of Producers, has never quite lost the idea that,
so far as industry is concerned, this form of association, and
no other, is Democracy. But the new form in which the
faith in Associations of Producers is now expressing itself
is concerned less with the ownership of the instruments of
production (it being to-day commonly taken for granted
that this must be vested in the community as a whole)
than with the management of industry. According to the
most thoroughgoing advocates of this creed, the manage-
ment of each industry should be placed, not separately in
the hands of those engaged in each establishment, any more
than in the hands of private capitahst employers, but in the
hands of the whole body of persons throughout the com-
munity who are actually co-operating in the work of the
industry, whether by hand or "by brain ; this management
being shared, by Workshop or Pit Committees, District
Councils and National Boards, among all these "workers."
This conception seems to us too one-sided to be adopted
7o8 Political Organisation
in its entirety, or to be successful if it were so adopted.
We venture to give, necessarily in a cursory and generalised
form, the results of our own investigations into the manage-
ment of industries and services by Democracies of Producers
and Democracies of Consumers respectively. In so far as
we may draw any valid inferences from previous experiments
of different kinds, we must note that tlie record of the
successive attempts, in modern industry, to place the entire
management of industrial undertakings in the hands of
Associations of Producers has been one of failure. In
marked contrast, the opposite form of Democracy, in which
the management has been placed in the hands of Associa-
tions of Consumers, has achieved a large and constantly
increasing measure of success. We do not refer merely to
the ever-growing development throughout the civilised
world, in certain extensive fields of industrial operation, of
Municipal and National Government, though from this some
valuable lessons may be learnt. Even more instructive is
the continuous and ever-widening success, in the importing,
manufacturing, and distributing of household supplies, of
the voluntary Associations of Consumers known as the
Co-operative Movement, which is almost entirely made up
of the same class of men and women — often, indeed, of the
very same individuals — as we find in the abortive " self-
governing workshops " and in the Trade Union Movement.
Why, for instance, is it possible for the manual workers,
organised as consumers, to carry on successfully the most
extensive establishments for the milling of flour, the baking
of bread, the making of boots and shoes, and the weaving
of cloth, when repeated attempts to conduct such establish-
ments by the same kind of members organised as Associa-
tions of Producers have not succeeded ? ^
1 For the successive experiments in Co-operative Production by
Associations of Producers the student is referred to The Co-operative
Movement m Great Britain, by Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb) (1891) ;
Co-operative Production, by Benjamin Jones (1894) ; and, for a more
recent smvey, the supplement to The New Statrsman of February 14,
1914. entitled "Co operative Production and Profit Sharing."
Associations of Consumers 709
The Democracy of Associations of Consumers, whatever
its shortcomings and defects, has, we suggest, the great
advantage of being demonstrably practicable. The job can
be done. It has also the further merit that it solves the
problem presented by what the economists call the Law of
Rent. It does not leave to any individual or group of
individuals the appropriation and enjoyment of those
advantages of superior sites and soils, and other differential
factors in production, which should be, economically and
ethically, taken only b}^ the community as a whole. More-
over, management by Associations of Consumers, whether
National, Municipal, or Co-operative, gives one practical
solution to the problem of fixing prices without competition,
by enabling every producer to be paid at his own full.
Standard Rate, and distributing the various products at
prices just over cost, the whole eventual surplus being
returned to the purchasers in a rebate or discount on
purchases, called " dividend " ; or otherwise appropriated
for the benefit and by direction of the consumers themselves.
Hence there is no danger of private monopoly ; no oppor-
tunity for particular groups of producers to make corners in
raw materials ; to get monopoly prices for commodities in
times of scarcity, or to resist legitimate improvements in
machinery or processes merely because these would interfere
with the vested interests of the persons ownmg particular
instruments of production or possessing a particular kind of
skill. In short, the control of industries and services by
Democracies of Consumers realises the SociaHst principle of
production for use and not for exchange, with all its mani-
fold advantages. The most significant of these superiorities
of Production for Use over Production for Exchange is its
inevitable effect on the structure and working of Democracy.
Seeing that the larger the output the smaller the burden of
overhead charges^ — or, to put it in another way, the greater
the membership the more advantageous the enterprise —
Associations of Consumers are not tempted to close their
ranks. This kind of Democracy automatically remains
710 Political Organisation
always open to new-comers. On the other hand, Associa-
tions of Producers, whether capitahsts, technicians or
manual workers, exactly because they turn out commodities
and services not for their own use, but for exchange, are
perpetually impelled to limit their numbers, so as to get,
for the existing membership, the highest possible remunera-
tion. This kind of Democracy is, therefore, instinctively
exclusive, tending always to become, within the community,
a privileged body. All this amounts to a solid reason in
favour of " nationalisation," " municipaHsation," and the
consumers' Co-operative Movement, which is reflected in the
continuous and actually accelerating extension of all of
them, not in one country only, but throughout the civiHsed
world. ^
But the Democracy based on Associations of Consumers,
whether in the National Government, the Municipality, or the
Co-operative Society, reveals certain shortcomings and
defects, some transient and resulting only from the existing
Capitalism, and others needing the remedy of a comple-
mentary Democracy of Producers. So long as we have a
society characterised by gross inequaHties of income, it is
inevitable that the conduct of industries and services by
Associations of Consumers should be even more advantageous
to the rich than to the poor, and of little or no use to those
who are destitute. The same trail of a Capitahst environ-
ment affects also the conditions of employment. The
Co-operative Society, the MunicipaHty or the Government
Department cannot practically depart far from the normal
conditions of the rest of the community ; and thus a\'ails
little to raise the condition of the manual working class. If,
however, the Associations of Consumers were co-extensi^'e
with the community, they would themselves fix the standard.
But there is a more fundamental criticism. The Democracy
^ See Towards Social Democracy ? by Sidney V^ebb (1916) ; and for
recent surveys, the sniiplcments to Tlie New Statesman of May 30, 1914,
and May 8, 1915, entitled, respectively, "The Co-operative Movement"
aud "State and Municipal Enterprise."
" Government from Above " 711
of Consumers; in Co-operative Society, Municipality or
State — ^however wide may be the franchise, however effec-
tive may be the Parliamentary machinery, and however
much the elected executive is brought under constituency
control — has the outstanding defect to the manual-working
producer that, so far as his own working life is concerned,
he does not feel it to be Democracy at all ! The manage-
ment, it is complained, is always " government from above."
It IS exactly for this reason that in the evolution of British
Democracy the conduct of industries and services by Associa-
tions of Consumers — whether in the voluntary Co-operative
Society or in the geographically organised Municipality
or State — has had, for a correlative, the organisation of
Associations of Producers, whether Professional Societies
or Trade Unions. Their first object was merely to maintain
and improve their members' Standard of Life. Without
the enforcement of a Standard Rate and protection against
personal tyranny, govenmient by Associations of Consumers
is apt to develop many of the evils of the " sweating "
characteristic of unrestrained capitaUsm. It is not now
denied, even by the economists, that Trade Unionism, in
its estabhshment of the Doctrine of the Common Rule,
and the elaboration of this into the Standard Rate, the
«
Normal Day, and the Pohcy of the National Minimum,
has to its credit during the past three-quarters of a century
no small measure of success, with more triumphs easily
within view. Trade Unionism among the manual workers,
like Professional Association among the brain- workers,'
has emphatically justified itself by its achievements.
But Trade Unionism, though it has gone far to protect
the worker from tyranny, has not, as yet, gained for him any
^ For a recent survey of Professional Association in England and
Wales — ^the only general study of it known to us — see the supplements to
the New Statesman of September 25 and October 2, 19 15 (" English
Teachers and their Professional Associations"), and April 21 and 28,
1917 (" Professional Associations "). The student will note the distinction
between two types of associations among professional brain-workers, one
having essentially Trade Union purposes, the other (which we distinguish
as the Scientific Society) concerned only for the increase of knowledge.
712 Political Organisation
positive participation in industrial management. To this
extent the complaints of the objectors among the manual-
working class are justified. In the perpetual see-saw of
opinion in the Labour world the movement towards Parlia-
mentary action and in favour of what we "may call Com-
munal Socialism became, at one time, almost an infatuation,
in that its most enthusiastic advocates thought that it would,
by itself, solve all problems. A reaction was inevitable.
The danger is that this reaction may itself take on the
character of an infatuation — this time in favour of the
universal domination of Associations of Producers, and the
" Direct Action " to which they are prone — against which,
m the perpetual see-saw, there will come, in its turn, a
contrary reaction, in the course of which Trade Unionism
itself may suffer.
This is not to say that the legitimate and desirable move-
ment, specially characteristic of the present century, for
increased direct participation in " management " of the
Associations of Producers — whether of Professional Societies
or of Trade Unions, of doctors and teachers, or of miners and
railwaymen — has been, in this or any other country, any-
thing like exhausted. In our view, in fact, it is along these
lines that the next developments are to be expected. But,
unless we are mistaken in our analysis, this does not mean
that the Trade Unions or Professional Societies will take
over the entire management of their industries or services,
for which, in our opinion, no Association of Producers can
be fitted.^ Democracies of Producers, like Democracies of
Consumers, have their pecuhar defects, and develop certain
characteristic toxins from the very intensity of the interests
that they represent. The chief of these defects is the
corporate exclusiveness and corporate selfishness habitually
developed by associations based on the common interest of
a particular section of workers, as against other sections of
' We add as an Appendix an extract from the concluding chapter of
our Industrial Democracy , published in 1897, in which we dealt with this
point
Vocational Exclusiveness 713
workers on the one hand, and against the whole bod\- of
consumers and citizens on the other. When Democracies
of Producers own the instruments of production, or even
secure a monopoly of the ser\'ice to be rendered, they have
always tended in the past to close their ranks, to stereotype
their processes and faculties, to exclude outsiders and to
ban heterodoxy. We see this tendency at work ahke in
the ancient and modem world, in the castes of India and
the Gilds of China, in the mediaeval Craft Gilds as well as
in the modem Trade Unions and Professional Associations.
So long as the Trade Union is an organ of revolt against
the Capitalist System — so long as the manual workers are
fighting a common enemy in the private owTier of land and
capital — this corporate selfishness is held in check ; though
the frequency of demarcation disputes, even in the Trade
Union Movement of to-da}^ gives some indication of what
might happen if the Trade Union became an organ of
government. We see no way of securing the community
of consumers and citizens against this spirit of corporate
exclusiveness, and against the inherent objection of an
existing generation of producers to new methods of working
unfamiliar to them, otherwise than placing the supreme
control in the Democracies of Consumers and citizens.
There is a further and more subtle defect in Democracies
of Producers, the very mention of which may perhaps be
resented by those Industrial Unionists who seek to curb
the " corporateness " of National Gilds by the " self-
government " of the workshop. The experience of self-
governing workshops shows that the relationship between
the indispensable director or manager (who must. Like the
conductor of an orchestra, decide the time and set the
time) and the workers whom he directs becomes hopelessly
untenable if this director or manager is elected or dismissible
by the very persons to whom he gives orders. Over and
over again, in the records of the almost innumerable self-
governing workshops that have been established in Great
Britain or on the Continent, we find their failure intimately
2 A2
714 Political Organisation
connected with the impracticable position of a manager
directing the workers during the day, and being reprimanded
or altogether superseded by a committee meeting of these
same workers in the evening ! Finally, there is the difficult
question of the price to be put on the article when it passes
to the consumer. Normally the price of a commodity must
cover the cost of production, and this cost is, in the main,
determined by the character of the machinery and process
employed. Hence, if the organised workers are given the
power to decide not only the number and qualifications of
the persons to be employed but also the machinery and
process to be used, they will, in fact, determine the price to
be charged to the consumer — not always to the consumer's
advantage, or consistently with the interests of other sec-
tions of workers.^
To sum up, we expect to see the supreme authority in
each industry or service vested, not in the workers as such,
but in the community as a whole. Any National Board
may weU include representatives of the producers of the
particular product or service, and also of its consumers,
but they must be reinforced by the presence of represent-
^ We do not discuss here all the difficulties inherent in the government
of a large and populous community — such, for instance, as that of
combining a large measure of local autonomy (which is what many people
mean by freedom) with the necessary unity of national policy and central
control (without which there would be gross inequality, internecine strife,
and chaos). This difficulty has to be faced alike by Industrial Unionists,
Gild Socialists, and the advocates of Democracy based on geographical
constituencies. Nor have we mentioned the problems, in which the Trade
Unions have their own wealth of experience, as to the relationship between
elected representatives and their constituents ; between representative
assemblies and executive committees ; and between executive committees
and the official staff. These problems and difficulties (on which we have
written in our Industrial Democracy) are common to all democratic systems
of administration, whether based on constituencies of producers, con-
sumers, or citizens. It seems to us that constituencies of producers present
special difficulties of their o^vn, such as (i.) that of defining the boundaries
between industries or services, and (ii.) the problem, within an industry
or a service, of how to provide for the representation of numerically
unequal distinct sections, groups, or grades, each with its own technique.
The further we go in Democracy the more complicated it becomes, and
the greater the need for knowledge.
A Complex Solution 715
atives of the community organised as citizens, interested in
the future as well as the present prosperity of the com-
munity. The management of industry, a complex function
of many kinds and grades, will, as we see it, not be the
sole sphere of either the one or the other set of partners,
but is clearly destined to be distributed between them — the
actual direction and decision being shared between the
representatives of the Trade Union or Professional Society
on the one hand, and those of the community in Co-operative
Society, Municipahty, or National Government on the other.
And this recognition of the essential partnership in manage-
ment between Associations of Producers and that Associa-
tion of Consumers which is the community in one or other
form, will, we suggest, take different shapes in different
industries and services, in different countries, and at different
periods ; and, as we must add, Vvdll necessarily take time
and thought to work out in detail. One thing is clear.
There will be a steadily increasing recognition of a funda-
mental change in the status both of the directors and
managers of industry (who are now usually either themselves
capitahsts, or hired for the service of capitahst interests),
and of the technicians and manual workers. The directors
and managers of industry, however they may be selected
and paid, will become increasingly the officers of the com-
munity, serving not their o^\'n but the whole community's
interests. The technicians and manual workers will become
ever less and less the personal servants of the directors and
managers ; and will be more and more enrolled, hke them,
in the service, not of any private employer, but of the
community itself, whether the form be that of State or
Municipahty or Co-operative Society, or any combination
or variant of these. To use the expression of the present
General Secretary of the Miners' Federation (Frank Hodges),
manager, technician, and manual worker ahke will become
parties to a " social " as distinguished from a commercial
contract. AU alike, indeed, whatever may be the exact
form of ownership of the instruments of production, will,
7i6 Political Organisation
so far as function is concerned, become increasing!}' partners
in the performance of a common public service.
We see in this evolution a great future for the Trade
Unions, if they will, in organisation and personal equipment,
rise to the height of their enlarged function. They will
need, by amalgamation or federation, and by affording
facilities for easy admission and for a simple transfer of
membership, to make themselves much more nearly than
at present co-extensive with their several industries. They
will have to make special provision in their constitutions to
secure an effective representation, on their own executive and
legislative councils, of distinct crafts, grades, or speciahsa-
tions, which must always form small minorities of the whole
body. They will find it necessary to make the local organisa-
tion of their members, in branch or district, much more
coincident than at present with their members' several
places of employment, so as to approximate to making
identical the workshop and the branch. There would seem
to be a great development opening up for the Works Com-
mittees and the " Shop Stewards," brought effectively into
organic relation with the nationally settled industrial policy.
At any rate, in industries already passing under the control
of Associations of Consumers, whether by nationalisation or
municipalisation, or by the spread of consumers' co-operation,
there will be great scope for District Councils and National
Boards, as well as for Advisory and Research Committees
representative of different speciahties, in which managers
and foremen, technicians and operatives, will jointly super-
sede the capitalist Board, of Directors. But the management
of each industry is very far from being the whole of the task.
In ParHament itself, and on Municipal Councils, the World
of Labour, by hand or by brain, will need to give a continuous
and an equal backing to its own pohtical party, in order to see
to it that it has its omti representatives — specialised and
trained for this supreme political function — not by ones and
twos, but in force ; gradually coming, in fact, to pre-
dominate over the representatives of the surviving capitalist
A Warning 717
and landlord parties. Trade Unionists, in the mass, will
not only have to continue and extend the loyalty and self-
devotion which have always been characteristic of successful
Trade Unionism, but also to acquire a more comprehensive
understanding of the working of democratic institutions, a
more accurate appreciation of the imperative necessity of
combining both the leading types of democratic self-
gov^emment — on the one hand the self-government based
on the common needs of the whole population di\dded into
geographical constituencies, and on the other the self-
government springing from the special requirements of
men and women bound together by the fellowship of a
common task and a common technique. The Trade Unions
and Professional Societies, if they are increasingly to partici-
pate in the government of their industries and services, will
in particular have to pro\dde themselves with a greater
number of whole-time specialist representatives, better paid
and more considerately treated than at present, and supplied
with increased opportunities for education and training.
We end on a note of warning. The object and purpose
of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and
Professional Associations, and pohtically in the Labour
Party, is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours. ^
It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of society,
by the elimination, from the nation's industries and services,
of the Capitalist Profitmaker, and the consequent shrinking
up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by
^ This is well put by an American economist. " The Trade Union
programme, or rather the Trade Union programmes, for each Trade
Union has a programme of its own, is not the unrelated economic demands
and methods which it is usually conceived to be, but it is a closely integrated
social philosophy and plan of action. In the case of most Union types
the programme centres indeed about economic demands and methods, but
it rests on the broad foundation of the conception of right, of rights, and
of general theory pecuUar to the workers ; and it fans out to reflect all
the economic, ethical, juridical, and social hopes and fears, aims, attitudes,
and aspira-tions of the group. It expresses the workers' social theory and
the rules of the game to which they are committed, not only in industry
but in social affairs generally. It is the organised workers' conceptual
world" (Trade Unionism in the United States, by R. F. Hoxie, p. 280).
yiS Political Organisation
owning. Profit-making as a pursuit, with its sanctification
of the motive of pecuniary self-interest, is the demon that
has to be exorcised. The journey of the Labour Party
towards its goal must necessarily be a long and arduous
one. In the painful " Pilgrim's Progress " of Democracy
the workers will be perpetually tempted into by-paths
that lead only to the Slough of Despond. It is not so
much the enticing away of individuals in the open pursuit
of wealth that is to be feared, as the temptation of particular
Trade Unions, or particular sections of the workers, to
enter into alhances with Associations of CapitaUst Em-
ployers for the exploitation of the consumer. " Co-partner-
ship," or profit-sharing with individual capitaUsts, has
been seen through and rejected. But the " co-partnership "
of Trade Unions with Associations of Capitahsts — whether
as a development of " Whitley Councils " or otherwise —
which far-sighted capitahsts will presently offer in specious
forms (with a view, particularly, to Protective Customs
Tariffs and other devices for maintaining unnecessarily
high prices, or to governmental favours and remissions
of taxation) is, we fear, hankered after by some Trade
Union leaders, and might be made seductive to particular
grades or sections of workers. Any such policy, however
plausible, would in our judgement be a disastrous under-
mining of the solidarity of the whole working class, and a
formidable obstacle to any genuine Democratic Control of
Industry, as well as to any general progress in personal
freedom and in the more equal sharing of the National
Product.
APPENDICES
719
APPENDIX I
ON THE ASSUMED CONNECTION BETWEEN THE TRADE UNIONS
AND THE GILDS IN DUBLIN
In Dublin the Trade Union descent from the Gilds is embodied
in the printed documents of the Unions themselves, and is
commonly assumed to be confinned by their possession of the
Gild charters. The Trade Union banners not only, in many
cases, bear the same arms as the old Gilds, but often also the
date of their incorporation. Thus, the old society of " regular "
carpenters (now a branch of the Amalgamated) claims to date
froiti 1490 ; the " Regular Operative House-painters' Trade
Union " connects itself with the Guild of St. Luke, 1670 ; and
the local unions of bricklayers and plasterers assume the date
of the incorporation of the Bricklayers' and Plasterers' Company
by Charles II, (1670). The box of the Dubhn Bricklayers'
Society does, in fact, contain a parchment which purports to
be the original charter of the latter Company. How this docu-
ment, given to the exclusively Protestant incorporation of
working masters, which was abohshed by statute in 1840, came
into the possession of what has always been a mainly Roman
Catholic body of wage-earners, dating certainly from 1830, is
not clear. The parchment, which is bereft of its seal and bears
on the back, in the handwriting of a lawyer's clerk, the words
" Bricklayers, 28th June, 1843," was probably thrown aside as
worthless after the dissolution of the Company.
A search among contemporary pamphlets brought to hght
an interesting episode in the history of the Dubhn building
trades. It appears that, after the dissolution of the Company,
Benjamin Pemberton, who had been Master, and who was
evidently a man of energy and abiUty, attempted to form an
721
722 Appendix I
alliance between the then powerful journeymen bricklayers' and
plasterers' societies and the master bricklayers and plasterers,
in order to resist the common enemy, the " foreign contractor."
This had long been a favourite project of Pemberton's. Already
in 1812 he had urged the rapidly decaying Company to resist the
uprising of " builders," and to admit Roman Catholic craftsmen.
But the Company, which then included scarcely a dozen practis-
ing master bricklayers or plasterers, took no action. In 1832
Pcmberton turned to the men, and vainly proposed to the
" Trades Political Union," a kind of Trades Council, that they
should take common action against " the contract system."
At last, in 1846, six years after the aboHtion of the Company,
he seems to have succeeded in forming some kind of alliance.
The journeymen bricklayers and plasterers were induced to
accept, from himself and his associates, formal certificates of
proficiency. Several of these certificates, signed by Pembcrton
and other employers, are in the possession of the older workmen,
but no one could explain to us their use. The alliance probably
rested on some promise of preference for employment on the
one part, and refusal to work for a contractor on the other.
This close connection between a leading member of the Company
and the Trade Unionists may perhaps account for the old charter,
then become waste paper, finding its way into the Trade Union
chest.
Particulars of Pemberton's action will be found in the para-
plilet entitled An Address of the Bricklayers and Plasterers to the
Tradesmen of the City of Dublin on the necessity of their co-operating
for the attainment of their corporate rights and privileges, by
Benjamin Pemberton (Dublin, 1833, 36 pages), preserved in
Vol. 1567 of the Haliday Tracts in the Royal Irish Academy.
In no other case, either in DubUn or elsewhere, have we found
a Trade Union in possession of any Gild documents or relics.
The absolute impossibility of any passage of the Dublin
Companies into the local Trade Unions will be apparent when
we remember that the bulk of the wage-earning population of
the city are, and have always been, Roman CatlioUcs. The
Dublin Companies were, to the last, rigidly confined to Episco-
paHan Protestants. Even after the bariiei"s had been nominally
removed by the Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Companies,
then shrunk up into little cliques of middle-class capitalists, with
little or no connectjon with the trades, steadfastly refused to
admit any Roman Catholics to membership. A few well-to-do
Roman Catholics forced tficmselves in between 1829 and 1838
Annexing Antiquity 723
by mandamus. But when inquiry was made in 1838 by the
Commissioners appointed under the Municipal Corporations Act,
only half a dozen Roman CathoHcs were members, and the
Companies were found to be composed, in the main, of capitalists
and professional men. There is no evidence that even one wage-
earner was in their ranks. Long before this time the Trade
Unions of Dubhn had obtained an unenviable notoriety. Already,
in 1824, the Chief Constable of Dubhn testified to the complete
organisation of the operatives in iUegal associations. In 1838
O'ConneU made his celebrated attack upon them in the House
of Commons, which led to a Select Committee. In short, whilst
the Dubhn Companies were, until their aboUtion by the Act of
1840, in much the same condition as those of London, with the
added fact of reUgious exclusiveness, the Dubhn Trade Unions
were long before that date at the height of their power.
The adoption by the Dublin Trade Unions of the arms,
mottoes, saints, and dates of origin of the old Dubhn Gilds is
more interesting as a trait of Irish character than as any proof
of historic continuity. Thus, in their rules of 1883, the brick-
layers content themselves with repeating the original preface
common to the Trade Societies which were formed in the be-
ginning of this century, to the effect that " the journeyman
bricklayers of the City of Dubhn have imposed on themselves
the adoption of the following laudable scheme of raising a Fund
for friendly society purposes." A card of membership, dated
1830, bears no reference to the Gild or Company of Bricklayers
and Plasterers from whom descent is now claimed. The rules
of 1883 are entitled those of the " incorporated " brick or stone
layers' association, and in the edition of 1888 this had developed
into the " Ancient Gild of Saint Bartholomew." Finally, the
coat of arms of the old company with the date of its incorpora-
tion (" A.D. 1670 ") appear on the new banner of the society.
Similarly, the old local society of " Regular Carpenters," which
was well known as a Trade Union in 1824, and was engaged
in a strike in 1833 (seven years before the abohtion of the
" Company of Carpenters, Millers, Masons, and Tylers, or Gild
of the fraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the house of
St. Thomas the Martyr," estabhshed by Henry VIII. in 1532),
adopted for the first time, in its rules of 1881, the coat of arms
and motto of the Gild, but retained its own title of " The United
Brothers of St. Joseph." The card of membership, printed in
1887, boldly gives the date of establishment as 1458, whilst
other printed matter places it at 1490. The Dubhn painters
724 Appendix I
now inscribe 1670 on their new banner, but the earliest traditions
of their' members date only from 1820. In short, the Irish
Trade Unionist, with his genuine love for the picturesque, and
his reverence for historical association, has steadily " annexed "
antiquity, and has embraced every opportunity for transferring
the origin of his society a few generations further back.
APPENDIX II
KULES AND REGULATIONS OF THE GRAND NATIONAL
CONSOLIDATED TRADES UNION OF GREAT BRITAIN AND
IRELAND, INSTITUTED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THE MORE
EFFECTUALLY ENABLING THE WORKING CLASSES TO SECURE,
PROTECT, AND ESTABLISH THE RIGHTS OF INDUSTRY (1834).
(Goldsmiths' Library, University of London.)
I. Each Trade in this Consolidated Union shall have its
Grand Lodge in that town or city most eligible for it ; such
Grand Lodge to be governed internally by a Grand Master,
Deputy Grand Master, and Grand Secretary, and a Committee
of Management.
II. Each Grand Lodge shall have its District Lodges, in any
number, to be designated or named after the town or city in
which the District Lodge is founded.
III. Each Grand Lodge shall be considered the head of its
own particular trade, and to have certain exclusive powers
accordingly ; but in all other respects the Grand Lodges are to
answer the same ends as the District Lodges.
rV. Each District Lodge shall embrace withm itself all
operatives of the same trade, hving in smaller towns or villages
adjacent to it ; and shall be governed internally by a President,
Vice-President, Secretary, and a Committee of Management.
V. Each District Lodge shall have (if necessary) its Branch
Lodge or Lodges, numbered in rotation ; such Branch Lodges
to be under the control of the District Lodge from which they
sprung.
VI. An unlimited n^imber of the above described Lodges
shall form and constitute the Grand National ConsoUdated
Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
725
726 Appendix II
VII. Each District shall have its Central Committee, com-
posed of a Deputy, or Deputies, from every District Lodge of
the different trades in the district ; such Central Committee
shall meet once in every week to superintend and watch over
the interests of the Consolidated Union in that District, trans-
mitting a report of the same, monthly, to the Executive Council
in London, together with any suggestions of improvements they
may think proper,
VIII. The General government of the G.N.C.T.U. shall be
vested in a Grand Council of Delegates from each of the Central
Committees of all the Districts in the C.U., to be holden every
six months, at such places as shall be decided upon at the
preceding Council ; the next Meeting of the Grand Council of
the C.U. to be held on the first day of September 1834, and to
continue its sitting so long as may be requisite.
IX. During the recess of the Grand Council of Delegates,
the Government of the C.U. shall be vested in an Executive
Council of Five ; which Executive \\ill in future be chosen at
the Grand Delegate Council aforesaid.
X. All dispensations or grants for the formation of new
Lodges shall come from the Grand Lodge of each particular
trade, or from the Executive Council, Apphcations for dis-
pensations to come through the Central Committee of the
District or by memorial, signed by at least 20 Operatives of
the place where such new Lodge is proposed to be iounded.
XL The Executive Council shall act as trustees for all
Funds provided by the C.U., for the adjustment of strikes, the
purchasing or renting of land, estabHshing provision stores,
workshops, etc. ; or for any other purposes connected with the
general benefit of the whole of the Union.
XII. All sums for the above purposes to be transmitted from
the Lodges to the Executive Council through some safe and
accredited medium,
XIII. District and Grand Lodges shall have the control of
their own funds, subject to the levies imposed upon them by
the Executive Council.
XIV. The ordinary weekly subscriptions of members be
threepence each member.
The Grand National 727
XV. No strike or turn out for an advance of wages shall be
made by the members of any Lodge in the Consohdated Union
without the consent of the Executive Council ; but in all cases
of a reduction of wages the Central Committee of the District
shall have the power of deciding whether a strike shall or shall
not take place ; and should such Central Committee be neces-
sitated to order a levy in support of such strike brought on by
such reduction of wages, such order shaU be made on aU the
Lodges ; in the first instance, in the District in which such
reduction hath taken place ; and on advice being forwarded to
the Executive they shall consider the case, and order accordingly.
XVL No higher sum than los. per week each shall be paid
to members during a strike or turn out.
XVIL All Lodges shall be divided into local sections of 20
men each, or as near that number as may be.
Miscellaneous and Auxiliary Lodges
XVIII. In all cases where the number of operatives in a
particular Trade, in any District, is too Umited to allow of such
Trade forming a Lodge of itself, the members of such Trade
shaU be permitted to become Unionists by joining the Lodge
of any other Trade in the District. Should there be several
Trades in a District thus limited with respect to the number
of their Operatives, they shall be allowed to form together a
District Miscellaneous Lodge, with permission, in order to
extend the sphere of the brotherhood, to hold out the hand of
fellowship to aU reaUy useful Labourers employed productively.
XIX. And, in order that all acknowledged Friends to the
Productive Classes may attach themselves to the C.U., an
Auxiliary Lodge may be established in every City or Town in
the Kingdom. The members of each Lodge shall conform to
all the Rules and Regulations herein contained, and be bound
in the same manner, and subject to aU the Laws of the
G.U.C.T.U. ; and shaU not, in any manner, or at any time or
place, speak or write anything in opposition to these Laws or
the interests of the Union aforesaid. The Auxiliary Lodge shall
be liable to be dissolved according to Article XXII.
XX. Lodges of Industrious Females shall be instituted in
every District where it may be practicable ; such Lodges to be
considered, in every respect, as part of, and belonging to, the
G.N.C.T.U.
728 Appendix II
Employment of Turn Outs
XXI. In all cases of strikes or turn outs, where it is
practicable to employ Members in the making or producing of
such commodities or articles as are in demand among their
brother Unionists, or any other operatives wilUng to purchase
the same, each Lodge shall provide a work-room or shop in
which such commodities and articles may be manufactured on
account of that Lodge, which shall make proper arrangements
for the supply of the necessary materials ; over which arrange-
ments the Central Committee of the District shall have the
control, subject to the scrutiny of the Grand Lodge Committee
of the Trade on strike.
XXII. The Grand Lodge of each Trade to have the power
of dissolving any District Lodge, in that Trade, for any
violation of these Laws, any outrage upon the PubHc Peace, or
for gross neglect of Duty. All Branch, Miscellaneous, or Auxiliary
Lodges to be subject to the same control.
XXIII. The internal management and general concerns of
each Grand or District Lodge are vested in a Committee of
Management, composed of at least Seven, and not more than
25 Members, each to be chosen by Ballot, and elected
by ha\nng not less than three-fourths of the Votes of the
Members present, at the time of his election, in his favour.
The whole of this Committee to go out of office Quarterly,
eligible, however, to re-election. The Grand Master, or President,
and the Secretary, or Grand Secretary of a Grand or a District
Lodge, to be considered Members of its Committee of Manage-
ment by virtue of their Offices. x
XXIV. Each Grand Lodge, in this C.U., to be considered
the centre of information regarding the general affairs of its
particular Trade ; each District Lodge to communicate ^\^th
its Grand Lodge at the end of each month, and to give an
account to it of the number of people Members in the District
Lodge — the gross number of hours of labour performed by
them in that district — the state of its funds— and any local or
general intelligence that may be considered of interest to the
Grand Lodge.
XXV. Tlio Committee of Management in each Lodge shall
sit at least on one evening in every week for the despatch of
business— and oftener if necessary.
Rules 729
XXVI. Each Grand or District Lodge to hold its meetings
on one evening in every month ; at which meeting a Report
of the Proceedings of the Committee, during the past month,
shall be laid before the Members, together with an Abstract of
the state of the Funds, an account of the prospects of the
Society, and any propositions or By-Laws which the Committee
may have to suggest for adoption, and any other information
or correspondence of interest to the Members. All nominations
of fresh Officers to be made at Lodge meetings, and all complaints
of Members to be considered and discussed therein.
XXVII. The Grand Master or Deputy Grand Master,
President, or Vice-President, or both, shall preside at aU meet-
ings of Grand or District Lodges, to keep order, state and put
questions according to the sense and intention of the Members,
give effect to the resolutions, and cause them to be put in force ;
and they shall be^ addressed by Members, during Lodge hours,
by their proper titles.
XXVIII. No subject which does not immediately concern
the interests of the Trade shall be discussed at any meetings
of Committees or Lodges ; and no proposition shall be adopted
in either without the consent of at least three-fourths of the
members present at its proposal — the question to be decided by
ballot if any Member demand it. Not less than five Members
of Committee of Management to constitute a Quorum, provided
the rest have all been duly summoned ; no Grand or District
Lodge to be considered open unless at least 30 members be
present.
XXIX. Each Grand or District Lodge shall have the power
to appoint Sub-Committees to enquire into or manage any
affair touching their interests, of which Committees the head
officers of the Lodge are always to be considered Members.
Of Secretaries
XXX. The duties of a secretary to a Grand or District
Lodge are : — To attend Lodge and Committee meetings and take
minutes of the proceedings, entering the same in a book to be
kept for that purpose.
To conduct all the correspondence of the Society. To take
down the names and^addresses of parties desirous of being
initiated into the Order ; and upon receiving the initiation fee
from each, and entering the amount into a book, he will give each
730 Appendix II .
party a card, by which they may be admitted into the place
appointed for the ceremony.
To receive the subscriptions of members, entering the same
into a small account book, numbering the Subscribers from
No. I, and following up the sequence in regulation order, giving
to each Subscriber a card, on which his contribution or payment
shall be noted.
To enter all additional weekly payments, and all levies, into
separate small books ; all subscriptions and payments to be
afterwards copied into a ledger, ruled expressly for the purpose.
The Secretary to be paid an adequate weekly salary ; and to
be allowed an Assistant if the amount of business require it.
The Secretary of each Grand or District Lodge shall balance
his books once every fortnight, and the Managing Committee
shall audit them, going over each item of receipt and expendi-
ture with strict attention, checking the same with scrupulous
care ; and if found correct, three of the Committee shall verify
the same by affixing their signatures to the page on which the
balance is struck.
Initiation
XXXI. Any of the Officers or Members of a Lodge may be
appointed by the Committee of Management to perform the
Initiation Service ; and to have charge of the Robes, etc., for
that purpose ; for which the Committee may allow him a reason-
able remuneration.
Any party applying to be initiated must bring forward two
witnesses as to character and the identity of his trade or
occupation.
Of Branch Lodges
XXXII. Branch Lodge Meetings shall be held on one evening
in every week, in the respective locaUties ; at which Lodges any
motion, proposed by law, etc., may be discussed and considered
by the Members previous to its being finally submitted to the
Grand or District Lodge Committee.
XXXIII. The Members of each Branch may elect a President
to preside at the Branch Lodge, and a Secretary to collect
subscriptions or levies for their Grand or District Lodge ; who
shall also attend meetings of the Conwnittec of Management
for instructions and infomiation, and to submit suggestions,
complaints, etc., from his Branch Lodge. No salaries or fees
Rules 731
to be allowed to officers of Branch Lodges, unless by the
unammous consent of their Members.
Wardens, Etc.
XXXIV, In addition to the Officers before mentioned in
these regulations, there shall be, in each Grand and District
Lodge a Warden, an Inside Tyler, an Outside Tyler, and a
Conductor, whose principal duties are to attend Initiations, and
see that no improper persons be admitted into the meetings.
These officers to be elected in the same manner, and at the same
periods, as other officers.
Miscellaneous Articles
XXXV. Any Member shall be Uable to expulsion from the
Lodges for any improper conduct therein ; and shall be excluded
from the benefits of the Society if his subscriptions be more
than six months in arrear, unless the Committee of Management
shall see cause to decide otherwise.
XXXVI. The G.U.C.T.U. Gazette to be considered the
official organ of the Executive Council, and the general medium
of intelUgence on the affairs of the Union.
XXXVII. Each Lodge shall, as soon as possible, make
arrangements for furnishing the means of instituting Libraries
or Reading-Rooms, or any other arrangements, affording them
every faciUty for meeting together for friendly conversation,
mutual instruction, and rational amusement or recreation.
XXXVIII. In all cases, where it be practicable, each Lodge
shall estabUsh within its locality one or more Depots for
provisions and articles in general domestic use, in order that its
Members may be supplied with the best of such commodities at
little above wholesale prices.
XXXIX. Each District and Grand Lodge shall endeavour
to institute a Fund for the support of sick and aged Members,
and for defraying the funeral expenses of deceased Members,
on a similar principle to that of Benefit Societies ; such fund to
be kept up by small monthly contributions from those Unionists
who are willing to subscribe towards it.
XL. Each Grand or District Lodge to have the power of
732 Appendix II
making its own By-Laws for purposes not comprised in these
Regulations ; but such By-Laws or Laws must not be in
opposition to, or in counteraction of, any of the Articles herein
specified.
XLL No Member can enter Lodge Meetings without giving
the proper signs, and producing his card to prove his member-
ship, and that he is not in arrears of subscription for more than
one month, unless lenity has been granted by order of Committee.
XLII. That a separate Treasurer be appointed for e\'ery
5^20 of the funds collected ; and that such Treasurers shall not
suffer any money to be withdrawn from their hands without
a written order, signed by at least three of the Managing Com-
mittee and presented by the Secretary, or one of the other officers
of the Society
XLIIL All sums under £30 shall be left in the hands of the
Secretary for current expenses ; but no outlay shall be made
by him without an express order from the Managing Committee,
signed by at least three of its Members.
XLIV. That every Member of this Union do use his best
endeavours, by fair and open argument, and the force of good
example, and not by intimidation or violence, to induce his
fellows to join the brotherhood, in order that no workmen may
remain out of the Union to undersell them in the market of
labour ; as, while that is done, employers will be enabled to
resist the demands of the Unionists, whereas, if no operatives
remain out of union, employers will be compelled to keep up
the price of Labour.
XLV. That each Member of the C.U. pay a Registration
Fee of 3d. to defray the general expenses ; which fee is to be
transmitted to the Executive once in every month.
XLVL That although the design of the Union is, in the
first instance, to raise the wages of the workmen, or prevent
any further reduction therein, and to diminish the hours of
labour, the great and ultimate object of it must be to estabUsh
the paramount rights of Industry and Humanity, by instituting
such measures as shall effectually prevent the ignorant, idle,
and useless part of Society from having that undue control
over the fruits of our toil, which, through the agency of a vicious
money system, they at present possess ; and that, consequently,
the Unionists should lose no opportunity of mutually encouraging
Rules 733
and assisting each other in bringing about A Different Order
OF Things, in which the really useful and intelligent part of
society onl)^ shaU have the direction of its affairs, and in which
weU-directed industry and virtue shall meet their just distinc-
tion and reward, and vicious idleness its merited contempt and
destitution.
XLVII, All the Rules and Regulations herein contained be
subject to the revision, alteration, or abrogation of the Grand
Delegate Council.
APPENDIX III
SLIDING SCALES
THEySliding Scale, an arrangement by which it is agreed in
advance that wages shall vary in a definite relation to changes
in the market price of the product, appears to have been famihar
to the iron trade for a couple of generations. " About fifty years
ago Mr. G. B. Thorneycroft, of Wolverhampton, head of a well-
known firm of iron-masters, suggested to certain other houses
that wages should fluctuate with the price of ' marked bars '
— these words indicating a quality of iron that then enjoyed a
high reputation. The suggestion was adopted to this extent,
that when a demand was made by the men for an advance in
wages, any advance that was given was proportionate to the
selling price of ' marked bars.' The puddlers received, as a
tule, IS. for each pound of the selling price ; but on exceptional
occasions, a special temporary advance or ' premium ' was
conceded. The terms of this arrangement do not seem to have
been reduced to writing, though they remained in force for
many years, and were well known as the Thorneycroft scale." ^
At the time of the great strike of Staffordshire puddlers, in
1865, a local understanding of a similar nature appears to have
been in existence. The joint committee of iron-masters and
puddlers, which was established at DarUngton in 1869 as the
" North of England Manufactured Iron Board," soon worked
out a formal sliding scale for its own guidance. This scale, as
well as that adopted by the Midland Iron Trade Board, has been
repeatedly revised, abandoned, and again re-established ; but
its working has, on the whole, commended itself to the repre-
^ Statement furnished to Professor Munro by Mr. Daniel Jones, of the
Midland Iron and Steel Wages Board, quoted in Sliding Scales in (lie Coal
and Iron Industries (p. 141).
734
Sliding Scales
735
sentatives of the ironworkers, and has, so far as the principle
is concerned, produced no important dissensions among them.
" We believe," said Mr. Trow, the men's secretary, to the
Labour Commission in 1892, " it would be most satisfactory
if this principle were generally adopted. ... In all our
experience of the past we have had less trouble in the periods
in which sliding scales have obtained." The cause of the
exceptional satisfaction of the ironworkers with their Wages
Boards and Sliding Scales is obscure, but it may be interesting
to the student to note that the members of the Ironworkers
Association are largely sub-contractors, themselves employing
workmen who are usually outside the Union, and have no direct
representation on the Board. For a careful statement of the
facts as to these Wage Boards and SUding Scales in the iron
industry, see The Adjustment of Wages (by Sir W. J. Ashley,
1903), pp. 142-15 1, and specimen rules, reports, and scales, pp.
268-307. At present (1920) separate Sliding Scales of this nature
are in force for the Cleveland and the North Lincolnshire Blast-
furnacemen ; the Scottish Iron and the Consett MiUmen ; Brown
Bayley's No. i MiU ; the Scottish Enginemen and Steel MiUmen ;
the Staffordshire Sheet Trade ; the Midlands Puddling Mills and
Forges ; and the South Wales and Monmouthshire Iron and
Steel Trade.
Widely different has been the result of the Sliding Scale
among the coal miners. Its introduction into this trade dates
from 1874, though it was not until 1879 that its adoption became
common. Since then it has been abandoned in all districts, and
it is energetically repudiated by the Miners' Federation. The
following table includes all the SUding Scales in the coal industry
known to us. Between 1879 ^^^ 1886 there were a number of
informal Sliding Scales in force for particular colUeries, which
were mostly superseded by the more general scales, or otherwise
came to an end. It is believed that no Sliding Scale is now in
force in any coal district.
July 24,
1874
South Staffordshire I.
Revised 1877,
May 28,
1875
South Wales I.
1880.
April 13.
1876
Somerset.
Ended 1889,
February 6,
1877
Cannock Chase I.
Revised 1879.
March 14,
1877
Durham I.
1879,
November i,
1877
South Staffordshire II.
1882.
April 14,
1879
Cannock Chase II.
1882.
October 11,
-1879
Durham II.
1887,
October 31,
1879
Cumberland I.
Ended 1881.
11^
Appendix III
November 3, 1879
November 10, 1S79
November 15, 1879
December 19, 1879
January 17,
January 20,
January 26,
February 14,
January i,
December 31,
January' i,
April 29,
June 6,
June 22,
July 18,
August 24,
September 29,
March 9,
June 12,
November 28,
March 12,
April 14,
February 25,
May 24,
June,
October,
January 18,
September,
1880
1880
1880
1880
1881
1881
1882
1882
1882
1882
1882
1882
1882
1883
1884
1884
1886
1886
1887
1887
1887
1888
1890
1893
Femdale Colliery I.
(S. Wales).
Bedworth Colliery I.
(Warwick).
Northumberland I.
Ocean Colliery I.
(S. Wales).
South Wales II.
West Yorkshire.
North Wales.
Bedworth CoUiery II.
Ashton and Oldham I,
Femdale Colliery II.
South Staffordshire III.
Durham III.
South Wales III.
Cannock Chase, &c. III.
Ashton & Oldham II.
South Wales (Anthracite).
Cumberland II.
Northumberland II.
Durham IV.
Cumberland III.
Forest of Dean.
Altham Colliery (Northd.).
Cumberland IV.
Northumberland III.
Lanarkshire.
South Staffordshire IV.
South Wales IV.
Forest of Dean.
Revised 1881
1880
1883
1882
1882
1881
Ended
Revised 1882
?
1884
1S84
1889
1883
1883
Ended
Revised
Ended
Revised
Ended
Revised
Ended
Ended
?
186 .
1886.
1889.
1886.
1888 ?
?
1888 ?
1887.
1889.
?
?
?
An exposition of the construction and working of Sliding
Scales is contained in hidnstrial Peace, by L. L. Price. Details
of numerous Scales are given in the report made by a Committee
to the British Association, entitled Sliding Scales in the Coal
Industry, which was prepared by Professor J. E. C. Munro
(Manchester, 1885), and in the Particulars of Sliding Scales,
Past, Present, and Proposed, printed by the Lancashire Miners'
Federation in 1886 (Openshaw, 1886, 20 pp.). Supplementary
infoi-mation is given in Professor Munro's papers before the
Manchester Statistical Society, entitled, " Sliding Scales in the
Iron Industry " (Manchester, 1885), and " Sliding Scales in the
Coal and Iron Industries from 1885 to 1889 " (Manchester, 1889).
The whole question is discussed in The Adjustment of Wages (by
Arbitrations y^y
Sir William Ashley, 1903), pp. 45-71 ; and in our own Industrial
Democracy, 1897.
The proceedings in the numerous arbitrations in the coal
and iron trade in the North of England, as well as several others
which are printed, furnish abundant information on the subject
of their working. A table of the variations of wages under
sliding scales was prepared by Professor J. E. C. Munro for the
Royal Commission on Mining Royalties, and pubhshed as
Appendix V. to the First Report, 1890 (C 6195).
2 B
APPENDIX IV
THE SUMMONS TO THE FIRST TRADE UNION CONGRESS
No copy of the invitation to the first Trade Union Congress
has been preserved, either in the archives of the Congress, the
Manchester Trades Council, or any other organisation known
to us. Fortunately, it was printed in the Ironworkers' Journal
for May 1868. But of this only one file now exists, and as the
summons is of some historical interest we reprint it for con-
venience of reference.
" Manchester, April 16, 1868.
"Sir — You are requested to lay the following before your
Society. The vital interests involved, it is conceived, will justify
the officials in convening a special meeting for the consideration
thereof.
" The Manchester and Salford Trades Council having
recently taken into their serious consideration the present aspect
of Trades Unions, and the profound ignorance which prevails in
the pubHc mind with reference to their operations and principles,
together with the probability of an attempt being made by the
Legislature, during the present Session of Parliament, to introduce
a measure which might prove detrimental to the interests of such
Societies unless some prompt and decisive action he taken by the
working classes themselves, beg most respectfully to intimate that
it has been decided to hold in Manchester, as the main centre
of industry in the provinces, a Congress of the representatives
of Trades Councils, Federations of Trades, and Trade Societies
in general.
" The Congress will assume the character of the Annual
Meetings of the Social Science Association, in the transactions of
which Society the artisan class is almost excluded ; and papers
738
The First Congress 739
previously carefully prepared by such Societies as elect to do so,
\\ill be laid before the Congress on the various subjects which at
the present time affect the Trade Societies, each paper to be
followed by discussion on the points advanced, with a view of the
merits and demerits of each question being thoroughly ventilated
through the medium of the pubhc press. It is further decided
that the subjects treated upon shall include the following :
"I. Trade Unions an absolute necessity.
" 2. Trade Unions and Political Econom}'.
"3. The effect of Trade Unions on foreign competition.
" 4. Regulation of the hours of labour.
"5. Limitation of apprentices.
" 6. Technical Education.
" 7. Courts of Arbitration and ConciUation.
"8. Co-operation.
" g. The present inequahty of the law in regard to conspiracy,
intimidation, picketing, coercion, etc.
" 10. Factory Acts Extension BiU, 1867 : the necessity of
compulsory inspection and its application to all places where
women and children are employed.
"II. The present Roj-al Commission on Trades Unions —
how far worthy of the confidence of- the Trade Union interests.
" 12. Legalization of Trade Societies.
"13. The necessity of an Annual Congress of Trade Repre-
sentatives from the various centres of industry.
*■
" All Trades Councils, Federations of Trades, and Trade
Societies generally are respectfully soUcited to intimate their
adhesion to this project on or before the 12th of May next,
together with a notification of the subject of the paper that each
body wiU undertake to prepare, and the number of delegates by
whom they will be respectively represented ; after which date
all information as to the place of meeting, etc., will be suppHed.
" It is not imperative that all Societies should prepare papers,
it being anticipated that the subjects wiU be taken up by those
most capable of expounding the principles sought to be main-
tained. Several have already adhered to the project, and have
signified their intention of taking up the subjects Nos. i, 4, 6,
and 7.
" The Congress wiU be held on Whit-Tuesday, the 2nd of
June next, its duration not to exceed five days ; and all
expenses in connection therewith, which wiU be very small.
740 Appendix IV
and as economical as possible, will be equalized amongst those
Societies sending delegates, and will not extend beyond their
sittings.
" Communications to be addressed to Mr. W. H. Wood,
Typographical Institute, 29 Water Street, Manchester.
" By order of the Manchester & Salford Trades Council.
" S. C. Nicholson, President.
" W. H. Wood, Secretary."
APPENDIX V
DISTRIBUTION OF TRADE UNIONISTS IN THE UNITED
KINGDOM
We endeavoured in 1893-94 to analyse the membership of all
the Trade Unions of which we could obtain particulars, in such
a way as to show the number and percentage to population in
each part of the United Kingdom. The following table gives
the local distribution of 1,507,026 Trade Unionists in 1892.
The distribution was, in most cases, made by branches, special
estimates being prepared for us in a few instances by the officers
of the Unions concerned. With regard to a few Unions having
about 4000 members no local distribution could be arrived at.
Table showing the distribution of Trade Union membership in 1892 in
each part of the United Kingdom, with the percentage to population
in each case.
County.
Population in
1891.
Ascprtiiiued
Trade
Unionists
Number of
Trade
Unionists
in 1892.
per 100 of
population.
Bedfordshire ....
165,999
553
0-33
Berkshire
268,357
975
0-36
Buckinghamshire
164,442
720
0-44
Cambridgeshire .
196,269
2,855
1-45
Cheshire
707,978
32,000
4-52
Cornwall
318,583
630
0-20
Cumberland .
266,549
10,280
3 86
Derbyshire .
432,414
29,510
6-82
Devonshire .
636,225
6,030
0-95
Dorsetshire .
188,995
305
o-i6
741
742
Appendix V
County.
Population in
1891.
Ascertained
Trade
Unionists
in 1892.
Number of
Trade
Unionists
per 100 of
population.
Durham
1,024,369
114. 810
II-2I
Essex
396,057
3.370
0-85
(without West Ham, in-
cluded in London).
Gloucestershire ....
548,886
26,030
4-74
Hampshire
587.578
5.665
0-96
(without Isle of Wight,
treated separately).
Herefordshire ....
113.346
385
0-34
Hertfordshire
.
215,179
1,125
0-52
Huntingdonshire
.
50,289
20
0-04
Isle of Wight
.
78,672
295
0-37
Kent ....
737.044
12,445
1-69
in London).
Lancashire
3,957.906
331.535
8-63
Leicestershire ....
379,286
27.845
7-34
Lincoln
467,281
9,480
2-03
London
5.517.583
194,083
3-52
(including Bromley, Croydon,
Kingston, Richmond, West
Ham and Middlesex).
Norfolk
460,362
4,880
I -06
Northamptonshire
308,072
12,210
3-96
Northumberland .
506,030
56.815
11-23
Nottinghamsliirc .
505.311
31.050
614
Oxford .
188,220
1,815
0-96
Rutland
22,123
0
D-OO
Shropshire .
254.765
3,225
1-26
Somerset
510,076
6-595
1-29
Staffordshire
1,103,452
49-545
4-49
Suffolk .
353.758
14.8S5
4-21
Surrey .
275.638
730
026
(without Croydon, Kingston,
and Richmond, included in
London).
«
Sussex
554.542
2.810
051
Warwickshire . - .
801,738
33,600
4-19
Westmoreland ....
00,.: 15
530
o-So
A County Census
743
County.
Populatioa in
1S91.
Ascertained
Trade
Unionists
in 1892.
Number of
Trade
Unionists
per 100 of
population.
Wiltshire
Worcestershire ....
Yorkshire, East Riding
Yorkshire, North Riding .
(with York City).
Yorkshire, West Riding
Total, England
255.119
422,530
318,570
435.897-
2,464,415
27,226,120
3,680
7.840
23.630
15.215
141,140
1,221,141
1-44
1-86
7-42
3-49
5-73
4-49
North Wales ....
South Wales and Monmouth
451,090
1.325. 315
8,820
88,810
I -96
6-70
Total, Wales and Monmouth
1,776,405
97.630
5-50
Total, England and Wales
29,002,525
1.318,771
4-55
Scotland
Ireland
Isle of Man
Guernsey
Jersey
Aldemey and Sark
4.033.103
4,706,162
55.598
35.339
54.518
2.415 ■
146,925
40,045
75
1,170
40
0
3-64
0-85
013
3-31
0-07
o-oo
Total, United Kingdom
37,889,660
1,507,026
3-98
APPENDIX
THE STATISTICAL PROGRESS
It is unfortunately impossible to present any complete statistics
appointment, in 1886, of John Burnett as Labour Correspondent
statistics of the -movement ; and the old Unions seldom possess
of Ironfounders, it is true, has exact figures since its cstablish-
The following tables may be useful as placing on record sucii
1. Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
2. Friendly Society of Ironfounders.
3. Steam Engine Makers' Society.
4. Associated Ironmoulders of Scotland.
5. United Society of Boilermakers and Iron Shipwrights.
6. Operative Stonemasons' Friendly Society.
7. Operative Bricklayers' Society.
8. General Union of Operative Carpenters and Joiners.
9. Typographical Association.
10. London Society of Compositors.
11. Bookbinders' and Machine Rulers' Consolidated Union.
12. United Kingdom Society of Coachmakers.
13. Flint Glass Makers' Friendly Society.
14. Amicable and Brotherly Society of Machine Printers.
15. Machine, Engine, and Iron Grinders' Society.
16. Associated Blacksmiths' Society.
17. Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.
18. Associated Carpenters and Joiners.
19. National Association of Operative Pla.sterers.
20. Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident Association.
21. United Journeymen Brassfounders' A.ssociation of Great Britain and
Ireland.
22. United Operative Plumbers' Association.
23. Alliance Cabinet Makers' Association.
744
VI
OF TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP
of Trade Union membership at different periods. Until the
to the Board of Trade, no attempt was made to collect any
a complete series of their own archives. The Friendty Society
ment in 1809, No total figures can be given with any confidence,
comparative figures as we have been able to collect :
24. United Operative Bricklayers' Trade, Accident, Sick, and Burial Society.
25. Amalgamated Society of Tailors.
26. Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners.
27. Glass Bottle Makers of Yorkshire United Trade Protection Society.
28. Durham ^Miners' Association.
29. National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers.
30. United Pattern Makers' Association.
31. National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives.
32. Amalgamated Societj' of Railway Servants.
33. Yorkshire Miners' Association.
34. United Machine Workers' Association.
35. National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association.
36. Railway Clerks' Association.
37. Amalgamated Tramway and Vehicle Workers,
38. National Union of Dock Labourers.
39. British Steel Smelters.
40. National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants.
41. Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees.
42. National Union of Clerks.
43. Workers' Union.
44. Amalgamated Musicians' Union.
45. National Amalgamated Union of Labour.
46. Postmen's Federation.
47. Post Office Engineering Stores.
745 2 B 2
746
Appendix VI
Table showing the Membership of certain Trade Unions at
Number of
Society.
Year of
Establish-
ment.
185I*
1809
'1824
183I
1832
1832
1848
1827
1849
1848
1835
1834
1849
184T
1844
16.
1857
17-
i860
18.
1861
19.
1862
20.
1863
21.
1866
22.
1832
23-
1865
24-
1832
2.5-
1866
20.
1853
27.
i860
28.
1869
1850.
5,000
4.073
2,068
814
1. 771
4.671
340
535
603
1,800
420
1.567
500
375
200
24.737
1855.
12,553
5.685
1,662
1.381
3.500
8.093
924
1,180
1,288
2,300
340
3.040
897
452
no
43.405
i860.
20,933
7.973
2,050
2,084
4,146
9.125
1,641
2,228
1.473
2,650
500
4,086
1.355
508
330
61,084
856
618
1865.
30,984
10,604
2,521
3.046
8,621
15.483
4.320
6,986
1,992
2,800
748
4.599
1,606
530
449
95.2S9
1,815
5,670
4.453
4.441
4.250
?
?
• Established January ro, 1831. The membership given for 1850 is
+ Merged in the National Union of Bookbinders and Machine Rulers,
\ In 1902 joined with the Operative Cabinet and ("iKiir Makers
Association,
Comparative Statistics
Successive Periods , from 1850 to 1918 inclusive.
7A7
1875.
1880.
1885.
1890.
1900.
1910.
1918.
44.032
44,692
51,689
67,928
87,672
110,733
298,782
12,336
11,580
12,376
14,821
18,357
17,990
28,586
3.871
4,134
5,062
5.822
8,566
14,401
27,206
4.346
4,664
5,611
6,198
7,504
7,880
7,961
16,191
17,688
28,212
32,926
47,670
49,393
95,761
24.543
12,610
11,285
12.538
19,419
7,055
4,929
4.832
5,700
6,412
12,740
38,830
23,284
34.441
10,885
4,420
1.734
2,485
7,727
5,653
12,000
3,600
5,350
6,551
9,016
16,179
21,436
11,602
4,200
5,100
6,435
8,910
11,287
12,230
12,940
1,670
1,501
1,788
2,910
4,064
5.027
— t
7.251
4,989
4,560
5.367
6,536
6,854
15,118
2,005
1,963
1,985
2,123
2,409
916
775
650
690
740
860
963
983
228
390
258
277
304
433
703
Tf
140,802
125.339
144.717
184,948
277,616
284,538
551.075
2,113
2,002
2,335
2,300
2,933
2,953
'17,238
14,917
17.764
25,781
31,495
65,012
55.7^5
> 124,841
6,642
4,673
4,535
4,742
9,808
3,964
3,742
3,211
2,110
4,236
11,009
6,522
4.IIO
17.561
10,707
13,128
16,961
23,950
37,361
40,000
1,821
1,890
2,344
2,162
—
5,241
7,500
1,679
2,232
2,666
5,350
11,186
10,907
13,000
1.965
1,346
1,246
4,298
5,270
—
- X
7.350
3,282
1.975
1,725
3,428
1.655
2,950
14.352
12,583
13,969
16,629
13,439
12.143
29,422
14.257
11,834
16,579
18,145
18,384
22,992
24,806
1,120
1,061
1,522
1,899
2,840
2,450
2,800
38,000
30,000
35,000
49,000
80,260
121,805
126,250
266,321
227,924
267,907
343,890
546,135
559.316
944,992
that with which the amalgamation started.
of Scotland to form the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades
748
Appendix VI
Number of
Society.
Year of
Establish-
ment.
1850.
iSs";.
isr,o.
l.Sf.j.
1870.
29.
1872
_
_
_
_
_.__
30-
1872
—
—
—
•
—
31-
1874
— ■
—
—
—
—
32.
1872
—
—
—
—
—
33-
1858
—
—
?
?
?
34-
1844
?
?
?
?
?
35-
igo2
—
—
—
—
36-
1897
—
—
—
—
—
37-
1889
—
. —
—
—
—
38.
18S9
—
—
—
—
—
39-
188G
—
—
—
—
—
40.
1891
—
■ — •
—
—
—
41.
1891
—
—
—
—
42.
1891
—
—
—
—
—
43-
1898
—
—
—
—
—
44-
1893
—
—
—
—
—
45-
1889
—
—
—
—
—
46.
1891
—
—
—
—
—
47-
I S9G
* Amalgamated in 191 3 with the United Pointsmen and Signalmen
Rnilwaymen.
•(• In 1917 the meinhors of tlie British Steel Smelters were merged in
Wo lia\e suggested that it is doubtful whether, in 1842, there
A quarter of a century later George Howell and others could
number was reached until the years of good trade that followed
whether the aggregate of a milUon was again reached until
the end of the century were two millions attained — a number
increased by over fifty per ct-nt.
Comparative Statistics
749
1875.
i88o.
1885.
1890.
1900.
1910.
1918.
5.271
4.633
3.582
7.958
8,675
7,373
25,000
418
824
1,241
2,205
4,604
7.214
10,290
4.3II
6,404
10,464
23.459
27,960
30,197
83,017
13,018
8,589
9.052
26,360
62,023
75,153
-n
8,000
2,800
8,000
50,000
54.475
88,271
100,400
276
279
455
2,501
3,769
4.843
23,374
297,615
1
251.453
300,701
456,373
707,641
772,367
1,187,073
—
—
—
—
6,248
{1902)
6,685
47,220
—
—
—
1.550
9,476
66,130
—
—
p
9,214
17,076
40,564
■ —
—
?
13.388
14.253
45,000
—
—
?
10,467
17.491
40,ooo(?)t
~"
~
7,551
22,426
83,000
(1919)
—
—
—
6,733
29,886
87,134
—
—
—
82
3,166
35,000
—
—
—
?
2,879
5,016
230,000
—
—
—
3,286
6,182
14,649
—
—
?
21,111
16,017
143,931
—
— •
—
23,180
37,892
65,078
—
940
3,500
14,000
106,629
189,046
911,706
814,270
961,413
2,098,779
and the General Railway Workers' Union to form the National Union of
the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation.
were as many as 100,000 enrolled and contributing members,
talk vaguely of a million members, but we doubt whether this
1871. In 1878-80 there was a great falHng off, and we doubt
1885. In 1892 we recorded a million and a half. Not until
doubled by 1915, and in the last four or five years again
750
Appendix VI
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APPENDIX VII
PUBLICATIONS RELATING TO" TRADE UNIONS
In the first edition of this book we gave a list, 45 pages long, of
books, pamphlets, reports, and other documents bearing on the
workmen's combinations. In Industrial Democracy, 1897, we
gave a supplementary Ust, 23 pages long. We do not reproduce
these Usts, to which the student can always refer ; nor have
we attempted to bring them down to date. The really useful
material for Trade Union study is to be found in the publications
of the Trade Unions themselves — the innumerable editions of
rules, the thousands of annual and monthly reports, the
voluminous hsts of piece-work prices, the intricate working
agreements, the verbatim reports of conferences, delegate
meetings and proceedings before Conciliation and Arbitration
Boards — which are ignored by the British Museum, and are
practically never preserved in local pubUc Ubraries. We made
an extensive collection in 1891-97, which we have deposited in
the British Library of Pohtical Science, attached to the London
School of Economics and Pohtical Science, where it has been,
to some extent, kept up to date, and where it is accessible to
any serious student. Some old pamphlets and reports of interest
are in the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London.
Of Trade Union pubhcations since 19 13 the most extensive
collection is that of the Labour Research Department, attached
to the Labour Party, 34 Eccleston Square, London.
753
APPENDIX VIII
THE RELATIONSHIP OF TRADE UNIONISM TO THE GOVERNMENT
OF INDUSTRY
In our work on Industrial Democracy, published in 1S97, we
formulated the following tentative conclusions with regard to
the participation of the workmen's organisations in industrial
management, and the relation of Trade Unionism to poUtical
Democracy :
" This survey of the changes required in Trade Union police-
leads us straight to a conclusion as to the part which Trade
Unionism will be expected to play in the management of the
industry of a democratic state. The interminable series of
decisions, which together make up industrial administration,
fall into three main classes. There is, first, the decision as to
what shall be produced — that is to say, the exact commodity
or service to be supplied to the consumers. There is, secondly,
the judgement as to the manner in which the production shall
take place, the adoption of material, the choice of processes,
and the selection of human agents. Finally, there is the
altogether different question of the conditions under which
tliese human agents shall be emplo^^ed— the temperature;
atmosphere, and sanitary arrangements amid which they shall
work, the intensity and duration of their toil, and the wages
given as its reward.
" To obtain for the community the maximum satisfaction it
is essential that the needs and desires of the consumers should
be the main factor in determining the commodities and ser\ices
to be produced. Whether these needs and desires can best be
ascertained and satisfied by the private enterprise of capitalist
profit-makers, keenly interested in securing custom, or by the
public service of salaried officials, intent on pleasing associations
of consumers (as in the British Co-operative Movement), or
75a
Consumers' Control 753
associations of citizens (the Municipality or the State), is at
present the crucial problem of Democracy. But whichever way
this issue may be decided, one thing is certain, namely, that
the several sections of manual workers, enrolled in their Trade
Unions, will have, under private enterprise or Collectivism, no
more to do with the determination of what is to be produced
than any other citizens or consumers. As manual workers and
wage-earners, they bring to the problem no speciahsed knowledge ;
and as persons fitted for the performance of particular services,
they are even biassed against the inevitable changes in demand
which characterise progressive community. This is even more
the case with regard to the second department of industrial
administration — the adoption of material, the choice of pro-
cesses, and the selection of human agents. Here, the Trade
Unions concerned are specially disquahfied, not only by their
ignorance of the possible alternatives, but also by their over-
whelming bias in favour of a particular material, a particular
process, or a particular grade of workers, irrespective of wliether
these are or are not the best adapted foV the gratification of
the consumers' desires. On the other hand, the directors of
industry, whether thrown up by the competitive struggle or
dehberately appointed by the consumers or citizens, have been
specially picked out and trained to discover the best means of
satisfying the consumers' desires. Moreover, the bias of their
self-interest coincides with the object of their customers or
employers — that is to say, the best and cheapest production.
Thus, if we leave out of account the disturbing influence of
monopoly in private enterprise, and corruption in pubUc
administration, it would at first sight seem as if we might
safely leave the organisation of production and distribution
under the one system as under the other to the expert know-
ledge of the directors of industry. But this is subject to one
all-important quahfication. The permanent bias of the profit-
maker, and even of the salaried official of the Co-operative
Society, the MunicipaUty, or the Government Department, is
to lower the expense of production. So far as immediate results
are concerned, it seems equally advantageous whether this
reduction of cost is secured by a better choice of materials,
processes, or men, or by some lowering of wages or other worsen-
ing of the conditions upon which the human agents are employed.
But the democratic state is, as we have seen, vitaUy interested
in upholding the highest possible Standard of Life of all its
citizens, and especially of the manual workers who form four-
754 Appendix VIII
fifths of the whole. Hence the bias of the directors of industry
in favor of cheapness has, in the interests of the community, to
be perpetually controlled and guided by a determination to
maintain, and progressively to raise, the conditions of employ-
ment.
" This leads us to the third branch of industrial administration
— the settlement of the conditions under which the human
beings are to be employed. The adoption of one material rather
than another, the choice between alternative processes or
alternative ways of organising the factory, the selection of
particular grades of workers, or even of a particular foreman,
may affect, for the worse, the Standard of Life of the operatives
concerned. Tliis indirect influence on the conditions of employ-
ment passes imperceptibly into the direct determination of the
wages, hours, and other terms of the wage contract. On all
these matters the consumers, on the one hand, and the directors
of industr}^ on the other, are permanently disqualified from
acting as arbiters. In our chapter on ' The Higgling of the
Market' we described how, in the elaborate division of labour
which characterises* the modern industrial s^^stem, thousands
of workers co-operate in the bringing to market of a single
commodity ; and no consumer, even if he desired it, could
possibly ascertain or judge of the conditions of employment in
all these varied trades. Thus, the consumers of all classes are
not only biassed in favour of low prices ; they are compelled
to accept this apparent or genuine cheapness as the only practic-
able test of efficiency of production. And though the immediate
employer of each section of workpeople knows the hours that
they work and the wages that they receive, he is precluded by
the stream of competitive pressure, transmitted through the
retail shopkee]-)er and the wholesale trader, from effectively
resisting the promptings of his own self-interest towards a
constant cheapening of labour. Moreover, though he ma\' be
statistically aware of the conditions of employment his lack of
personal experience of those conditions deprives him of any
real knowledge of their effects. To the brain-working captain
of industry, maintaining himself and liis family on thousands
a year, the manual- working wage-earner seems to belong to
another species, having mental faculties and bodily needs
altogether different from his own. Men and women of the
upper or middle classes are totally unable to realise what state
of body and mind, what level of character and conduct, result
from a life spent, from childhood to old age, amid the dirt.
Producers Control 755
the smell, the noise, the ugHness, and the vitiated atmosphere
of the workshop ; under constant subjection to the peremptory,
or it may be brutal, orders of the foreman ; kept continuously
at the laborious manual toil for sixty or seventy hours in every
week of the year ; and maintained by the food, clothing, house-
accommodation, recreation, and family life which are impHed
by a precarious income of between ten shillings and two pounds
a week. If the democratic state is to attain its fullest and finest
development, it is essential that the actual needs and desires of
the human agents concerned should be the main considerations
in determining the conditions of emplo5mient. Here then we
find the special function of the Trade Union in the administration
of industry. The simplest member of the working-class organisa-
tion knows at any rate where the shoe pinches. The Trade
Union official is specially selected by his fellow-workmen for
his capacity to express the grievances from which they suffer,
and is trained by his caUing in devising remedies for them.
But in expressing the desires of their members, and in insisting
on the necessary reforms, the Trade Unions act within the
constant friction-brake suppHed by the need of securing employ-
ment. It is always the consumers and the consumers alone,
whether they act through profit-making entrepreneurs or through
their own salaried officials, who determine how many of each
particular grade of workers they care to employ on the conditions
demanded. . . . Thus we find no neat formula for defining the
rights and duties of the individual in society. In the democratic
state every individual is both master and servant. In the work
that he does for the community in return for his subsistence he
is, and must remain, a servant, subject to the instructions and
directions of those whose desires he is helping to satisfy. As a
Citizen-Elector jointly with his fellows, and as a Consumer to
the extent of his demand, he is a master, determining, free from
any superior, what shaU be done. Hence, it is the supreme
paradox of democracy that every man is a servant in respect
of the matters of which he possesses the most expert proficiency,
namely, the professional craft to which he devotes his working
hours ; and he is a master over that on which he knows no more
than anybody else, namely, the general interests of the com-
munity as a whole. In this paradox, we suggest, lies at once
the justification and the strength of democracy. It is not, as
is commonly asserted by the superficial, that Ignorance rules
over Knowledge, and Mediocrity over Capacity. In the
administration of society Knowledge and Capacity can make
756 Appendix VIII
no real and duiable progress except by acting on and through
the minds of the common human material which it is desired
to improve. It is only by carrying along with him the ' average
sensual man,' that even the wisest and most philanthropic
reformer, however autocratic his power, can genuinely change
the face of things. Moreover, not even the wisest of men can
be trusted with that supreme authority which comes from the
union of knowledge, capacity, and opportunity with the power
of untrammelled and ultimate decision. Democracy is an
expedient — perhaps the only practicable expedient — for pre-
venting the concentration in any single individual or in any
single class of what inevitably becomes, when so concentrated,
a terrible engine of oppression. The autocratic emperor, served
by a trained bureaucracy, seems to the Anglo-Saxon a perilously
near approach to such a concentration. If democracy meant,
as early observers imagined, a similar concentration of Know-
ledge and Power in the hands of the numerical majority for
the time being, it might easily become as injurious a tyranny
as any autocracy. An actual study of the spontaneous demo-
cracies of Anglo-Saxon workmen, or, as we suggest, of any other
democratic institutions, reveals the sphtting up of this dangerous
authority into two parts. Whether in political or in industrial
democracy, though it is the Citizen who, as Elector or Consumer,
ultimately gives the order, it is the Professional Expert who
advises what the order shall be.
" It is another aspect of this paradox that, in the democratic
state, no man minds liis own business. In the economic sphere
this is a necessary consequence of division of labour ; Robinson
Crusoe, producing solely for his own consumption, being the last
man who minded nothing but his own business. The extreme
complication brought about by universal production for exchange
in itself impHes that every one works with a view to fulfilling
the desires of other people. The crowding together of dense
populations, and especially the co-operative enterprises which
then arise, extend in every direction this spontaneous delegation
to professional experts of what the isolated individual once
deemed ' his own business.' Thus, the citizen in a modern
municipality no longer produces his own food or makes his own
clothes ; no longer protects his own hfe or property ; no longer
fetches his own water ; no longer makes his own thoroughfares,
or cleans or lights them when made ; no longer removes his
own refuse or even disinfects his own dweUing. He no longer
educates his own children, or doctors and nurses his own
What is Liberty ? 757
invalids. Trade Unionism adds to the long list of functions thus
delegated to professional experts the settlement of the conditions
on which the citizen will agree to co-operate in the national
service. In the fully-developed democratic state the Citizen
will be always minding other people's business. In his pro-
fessional occupation he will, whether as brain-worker or manual
labourer, be continually striving to fulfil the desires of those
whom he serv'es ; whilst as an Elector, in his parish or his
co-operative society, his Trade Union or his poUtical associa-
tion, he will be perpetually passing judgment on issues in
which his personal interest is no greater than that of his
fellows.
" If, then, we are asked whether democracy, as shown by
an analysis of Trade Unionism, is consistent \nth Individual
Liberty, we are compelled to answer by asking, WTiat is Liberty ?
If Liberty means every man being his own master, and following
his own impulses, then it is clearly inconsistent, not so much
with democracy or any other particular form of government, as
with the crowding together of population in dense masses,
division of labour, and, as we think, ci\dHsation itself. WTiat
particular individuals, sections, or classes usually mean by
' freedom of contract,' ' freedom of association,' or ' freedom
of enterprise ' is freedom of opportunity to use the power that
they happen to possess — that is to say, to compel other less
powerful people to accept their terms. This sort of personal
freedom in a community composed of unequal units is not
distinguishable from compulsion. It is, therefore, necessary to
define Liberty before talking about it ; a definition which every
man will frame according ito his own view of what is socially
desirable. We ourselves understand by the words ' Liberty '
or ' Freedom,' not any quantum of natural or inalienable
rights, but such conditions of existence in the community as
do, in practice, result in the utmost possible development of
faculty in the individual human being. Now, in this sense
democracy is not only consistent with. Liberty, but is, as it
seems to us, the only way of securing the largest amount of it.
It is open to argument whether other forms of government
may not achieve a fuller development of the faculties of particular
individuals or classes. To an autocrat, untrammelled rule over
a whole kingdom may mean an exercise of his indi%ddual
faculties, and a development of his individual personality, such
as no other situation in life would afford. An aristocracy or
government by one class in the interests of one class, may
758 Appendix VIII
conceivably enable that class to develop a perfection in phj-sical
grace or intellectual charm attainable by no other system of
society. Similarly, it might be argued that, where the ownership
of the means of production and the administration of industry
are unreservedly left to the capitaUst class, this ' freedom of
enterprise ' would result in a development of faculty among
the captains of industry which could not otherwise be reached.
We dissent from all these propositions, if only on the ground
that the fullest development of personal character requires the
pressure of discipline as well as- the stimulus of opportunity.
But however untrammelled power may affect the character of
those who possess it, autocracy, aristocracy, and plutocracy
have all, from the point of view of the lover of hberty, one
fatal defect — they necessarily involve a restriction in the
opportunity for development of faculty among the great mass
of the population. It is only when the resources of the nation
are dehberately organised and dealt with for the benefit, not of
particular individuals or classes, but of the entire community ;
when the administration of industry, as of every other
branch of human affairs, becomes the function of special-
ised experts, working through deliberately adjusted Common
Rules ; and when the ultimate decision on pohcy rests in
no other hands than those of the citizens themselves, that
the maximum aggregate development of individual intellect
and individual character in the community as a whole can be
attained.
" For our analysis helps us to disentangle from the complex
influences on individual development those caused by democracy
itself. The universal speciaUsation and delegation which, as we
suggest, democratic institutions involve, necessarily imply a
great increase in capacity and efficiency, if only because specialisa-
tion in service means expertness, and delegation compels selection.
Tliis deepening and narrowing of professional skill may be
expected, in the fully-developed democratic state, to be accom-
panied by a growth in culture of which our present imperfect
organisation gives us no adequate idea. So long as life is one
long scramble for personal gain — still more, when it is one long
struggle against destitution — there is no free time or strength
for much development of the sympathetic, intellectual, artistic,
or reUgious faculties. When the conditions of employment are
deliberately regulated so as to secure adequate food, education,
and leisure to every capable citizen, the great mass of the
population will, for the first time, have any real chance of
Need for Knowledge 759
expanding in friendship and family affection, and of satisf\dng
the instinct for knowledge or beauty. It is an even more unique
attribute of democracy that it is always taking the mind of the
individual off his own narrow interests and immediate concerns,
and forcing him to give his thoughts and leisure, not to satisfpng
his owm desires, but to considering the needs and desires of his
fellows. As an Elector — still more as a chosen Representative
— in his parish, in his professional association; in his co-operative
society, or in the wider poHtical institutions of his state, the
' average sensual man ' is perpetually impelled to appreciate
and to decide issues of public pohcy. The working of democratic
institutions means, therefore, one long training in enhghtened
altruism, one continual weighing, not of the advantage of the
particular act to the particular individual, at tiie particular
moment, but of those ' larger expediencies ' on which all
successful conduct of social hfe depends.
" If now, at the end of this long analysis, we try to formulate
our dominant impression, it is a sense of the vastness and
complexity of democracy itself. Modern civilised states are
driven to this complication by the dense massing of their
populations, and the course of industrial development. The
very desire to secure mobihty in the crowd compels the adoption
of one regulation after another, which limit the right of every
man to use the air, the water, the land, and even the artificially
produced instruments of production, in the way that he may
think best. The very discovery of improved industrial methods,
by leading to specialisation, makes manual labourer and brain-
worker aUke dependent on the rest of the community for the
means of subsistence, and subordinates them, even in their own
crafts, to the action of others. In the world of civilisation and
progress, no man can be his own master. But the very fact
that, in modern society, the individual thus necessarily loses
control over his own hfe, makes him desire to regain collectively
what has become individually impossible. Hence the irresistible
tendency to popular government, in spite of all its difficulties
and dangers. But democracy is still the Grea't Unknown. Of
its full scope and import we can yet catch only gUmpses. As
one department of social Ufe after another becomes the subject
of careful examination we shall gradually attain to a more
complete vision. Our own tentative conclusions, derived from
the study of one manifestation of the democratic spirit, may,
we hope, not only suggest hypotheses for future verification,
but also stimulate other students to carry out original investiga-
760 Appendix VIII
tions into the larger and perhaps more significant types of
democratic organisation."
In 1920, after nearly a quarter of a century of further experi-
ence and consideration, we should, in some resjxcts, put tills
differently. The growth, among all classes, and especially
among the manual workers and the technicians, of what we
may call corporate self-consciousness and public spirit, and the
diffusion of education — coupled with further discoveries in
the tecimique of democratic institutions— would lead us to-
day to include, and even to put in the forefront, certain
additional suggestions, which we can here only summarise
briefly.
There is, in the first place, a genuine need for, and a real
social advantage in giving recognition to, the contemporary
transformation in the status of the manual working wage-earners,
on the one hand, and of the technicians on the other, as com-
pared with that of the manager or mere " captain of industry."
This change of status, which is, perhaps, the most important
feature of the industrial history of the past quarter of a century,
will be most easily accorded its legitimate recognition in those
industries and services in which the profit-making capitalist
proprietor is dispensed with in favour of public ownership,
whether national, municipal, or co-operative. This is, incident-
ally, an important reason for what is called " nationalisation."
It is a real social gain that the General Secretary of the Swiss
Rail waym en's Trade Union should sit as one of the five members
of the supreme governing board of the Swiss railway administra-
tion. We ourselves look for the admission of nominees of the
manual workers, as well as of the technicians, upon the executive
boards and committees, on terms of complete equality \sith the
other members, in all publicly owned industries and services ;
not merely, or even mainly, for the sake of the advantages
of the counsel and criticism that the newcomers may bring
from new standpoints, but principally for the sake of botli
inspiring and satisfying the Increasing sense of corporate self-
consciousness a«d public spirit among all those employed in
these enterprises.
In the second place we should lay stress on the change that
is taking place in the nature (and in the conception) of authorit}'
itself. In our analysis of 1897 we confined ourselves unduly to
a separation of spheres of authority. Whilst still regarding that
analj'tic separation of " managenunt " into three classes of
judgements or decisions as fundamentally valid, we should
Much more Cons^iltation 761
nowadays attach even more importance to the wavs in which
authorit\- itself, in indiistr}^ as well as in the rest of government,
is being rapid!}?- transformed, alike in substance and in methods
of expression. The need for final decisions will remain, not
merely in emergencies, but also as to poUcy ; and it is of high
importance to vest the responsibility for decision, according to
the nature of the case, in the right hands. But we suggest that
a great deal of the old autocrac}^ in industr}^ and ser\dces, once
deemed to be indispensable, is ceasing to be necessary to ef!i-
cienc}^ and will accordingly, as Democracy becomes more
genuinely accepted, gradually be dispensed with. A steadily
increasing sphere will, except in matters of emergency, be found
for consultation among all grades and sections concerned, out
of which will emerge judgements and decisions arrived at, very
largely, by common consent. This will, we believe, produce
actually a higher standard of industrial efficiency than mere
autocracy could ever hope for. WTiere knowledge is a common
possession the facts themselves \vill often decide ; and though
decisions may be short, sharp, and necessarily formulated by
the appropriate person, they will not ine\itably bear the impress
of (or be resented as) the dictates of irresponsible autocracy.
We may instance two large classes of considerations which
will, we think, with great social advantage, come to be matters
for mutual consultation in those committees and councils which
already characterise the administration of all industry on a
large scale, whether under private or pubHc ownership, and which
will, in the future, be increasingly representative of all grades of
workers by hand or by brain. To such committees and councils
there will come, as a matter of course, a stream of reports from
the disinterested outside costing experts, which will carry ^vith
them no coercive authorit}'-, but which will graphically reveal
the efficiency results, so far as regards cost and output, of each
part of the enterprise, in comparison both with its own past, and
with the corresponding results of other analogous enterprises.
Similarly, there ^^ill come a stream of financial and merely
statistical reports from equally disinterested outside auditors
and statisticians, making graphic revelations as to the progress
of the enterprise, in comparison with its own previous experience
and with the progress of like enterprises elsewhere. Further,
there will be a stream of what we may call scientific reports,
also from disinterested outside experts, not only describing new
inventions and discoveries in the technique of the particular
enterprise, but suggesting, in the Hght of recent surve3'^s of the
762 Appendix VIII
work, how they could be practically applied to its peculiar
circumstances. These three classes of reports, all of them by
disinterested experts, engaged in keeping under review all
analogous enterprises at home or abroad, and having neither
interest in, nor authority over, any of them, will, we suggest,
be discussed by the members of the committees and councils on
terms of equality ; the decisions being taken, according to the
nature of the case, by those in whom the responsibility for
decision may be vested.
But there will be a second extensive class of reports of a
different character, conveying not statements of fact but views
of poHcy. There will, we must assume, be reports from those
responsible, not merely or mainly for satisfying the existing
generation of consumers, producers, or citizens^ but for safe-
guarding the interests of the community as a whole, in the
future as well as in the present. There will be the reports from
the organs of the consumers or users of the particular commodity
or service (such as the District Committees representing tele-
phone users set up by the Postmaster-General as organs of
criticism and suggestion for his telephone administration).
Finally there will be reports convening criticisms and suggestions
-from committees or councils representing other enterprises, or
other sections of producers (whether technicians or manual
workers), which may have something to communicate that they
deem important. These reports will, none of them, come with
coercive authority, but merely as conveying information, to be
considered in the consultations out of which the necessary
decisions will emerge.
Opinions may differ as to the competence to take part in
such consultations of the selected representatives of the manual
workers and the technicians respectively. We are ourselves of
opinion that, taking the business as a whole, such representatives
will be found to compare, in conipetence, quite favourably with
the average member of a Board of Directors. But whether or
not the counsels and decisions of great industrial enterprises
arc likely to be much improved by such consultations — and we
confidently expect that they will be — we suggest that it is
predominantly in this form that the principles of Democracy
may, in practice, be apphed to industrial administration ; and
that it will be for the Professional Associations of the technicians
and the Trade Unions of the manual wurkei-s to prove them-
selves equal to the transformation in their status that this or
any other apphcation of Democracy involves.
A Future Work 763
But here we must pause. In a future work on the achieve-
ments, policy, and immediate controversies of the British Labour
and Socialist Movement we shall give the historical and the
psychological analysis, in the Ught of the experience of the past
few decades, upon which we base our present conclusions.
INDEX
Aberdare, 514
Aberdare, Lord, 276-7, 285
Aberdeen, cotton-weavers of, Sa ;
tailors of, 79
Abnormal place, 513-16
Abraham, William, 596
Acetylene Welders, 495
Acland, Sir A. H. Dyke, 308
Actions for damages, 597-634
Actors' Association, 507
Actuarial position of T.U., 267-8
Adamson, W., 699
Admiralty Constructive Engineers,
507
Agricultural Labourers, 136, 144-6;
328-34, 405, 416, 439-4O' 488-9.
624, 648
Agriculture, Royal Commission on,
648
Albert Hall, 666, 669
Alison, Sir Archibald, 170, 173
" All Grades Movement," 525-6
Allan, Wm., 210-14, 232, 234 (life),
233-40, 243, 248, 350, 362, 419
Alliance Cabinet Makers' Associa-
tion. See Cabinet Makers
Almshouses, provided by the Liver-
pool Shipwrights, 39
Althorpe, Lord, 132
Amalgamated Association of Boot
and Shoe Makers, 436
Amalgamated Association of Miners,
306, 349, 511
Amalgamated Engineering Union,
488, 551
Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube
Makers' Society, 359
Amalgamated Society of. See Car-
penters, Engineers, Cotton-spin-
ners, Cotton-weavers, Boot and
. Shoemakers, Builders' Labourers,
Card and Blowing Room Opera-
tives, Metal Planers, Railway
Servants, Tailors, Watermen and
Lightermen
Amalgamated Tramway and Vehicle
Workers, 744
Amalgamations and Federations,
546-554
American Federation of Labour,
135, 556
Amicable and Brotherly Society of
Machine Printers (Cotton and
Calico), 70, 75 ■
Amicable Society of Woolstaplers,
83
Anderson, W. C, 699
Anti-corn Law League, 174, 176
Applegarth, Robert, 232, 233-40,
236-7 (life), 248, 350, 362, 391,
419, 680
Appleton, W. A., 556
Apprentices, 27, 29, 38, 45, 47, 83,
267
Apprentices, Statute of, 47, 59, 66,
250-51
Arbitration, 29, 71, 226-7, 337.
643
Arch, Joseph, 329, 334, 680, 682
Armstrong, Lord, 315
Arnot, R. Page, 489, 511, 524,
532, 633, 662
Ashley, Sir W. J., 4, 5, 13, 15, 29.
511. 735-7
Ashton, murder of, 122
Ashton, Thomas, 311, 356
Ashton-under-Lyne, strikes at, 119,
122
765
766
Index
Ashworth, 169
Asquith, H. H., 528-9, 636, 645, 692
Assinder, G. F., 599
Associated. See Blacksmiths, Car-
penters, Engineers, Iron-forgers,
Railwaynien, and Shipwrights
Associated Society of Locomotive
Engineers and Firemen, 439, 505,
527. 530. 535. 539, 545- See also
Railwaynien
Associations of Consumers, 706-18
Associations of Producers, 653-63,
704-18, 752-62
Atchison's Haven, 10
Austin, Michael, 596
Ayrshire Miners, 681
Bachelor Companies, 4, 5, 6, 7
Bacrnreither, Dr., 220, 300
Baker, C, 634
Bakers, 369, 438, 559
Bamford, Samuel, 96, 164
Bank Officers' Guild, 505
Barker, Ernest, 414
Barnes, Geo. N., 490, 692-3, 695. 698
Barnsley, first worldng-man Town
Councillor elected in, 305
Basketmakers, 14, 45, 438, 552
Bass, Michael, 523
Bass-dressers, 336
Beale, C. G., 530
Beamers, 477
Beehive, the, 36, 254-5, 298
Beer, M., 131, T57, 162, 175, 414,
680
Beesly, Professor E. S., 222, 231-2,
236, 238, 246, 250, 263-4, 269,
275, 288, 293, 298, 312, 341, 362,
415, 510. See Positivists
Belfast, 123, 136, 523
Belfast and Dublin Locomotive
Engine-drivers' and Firemen's
Trade Union, 523
Bell, Sir Hugh, xiv
Bell Inn, Old Bailey, 205, 243, 245
Bell, Richard, 526-7, 601, 684
Bell, Robert, 58
Benbow, William, 163-4
Bennett, T. K., 2.|6
Bentham, Jeremy, 96, 178
Bernstein, Eduard, 652
Besant, Mrs. Annie, 396, 399, 402
Bevan, G. Philhp.s, 347
Bibliography, 751
Birmingham, building trades of,
129 ; " Builders' Parliament^' at,
130 ; tailors of, 32 ; Trade
Unionism in, 358-9 ; Trades Coun-
cil of, 280, 329-30, 399 ; trades
procession at, 177
Birtwistle, Thomas, 309
Bit and Spur Makers, 92
Blackburn, 307, 697 ; riots at, 344
Blackburn List, the, 226
" Black-coated proletariat," 503-9
Blacklisting, 284, 598
Blacksmiths, Associated Society of
Scotland. See Smiths
Blastfurnacemen. See Ironworkers
Bleachers, 478, 480
Block Printers, Glasgow, 552
Blok, P. J., 24
Boa, Andrew, 290
" Boaxd of Green Cloth " at Dublin,
104
Boilermakers, 174, 205, 230, 247,
259, 261-2, 314, 321-2, 348, 353,
365, 378. 428-31. 490-91. 559. 744
Bolton, • caUco - printers at, 79
cotton operatives of, 81, 92, 307 ;
engineers of, 207-S
Bondficld, Miss Margaret, 496
Bookbinders, 23, 77, 79, 91, 176,
188, 196-7, 201, 244-5, 437-8, 744
Boot and Shoe Operatives, 57, 68,
77. 79-80, 143, 150, 19J, 2j8,
236, 336, 407. 436-7. 493-4. 744-
See also Shoemakers
Booth, Charles, 375, 380-81
Bowerman, C. W., 362
" Box Club," 36-7
Boy labour, 202
Brace, W., 692
Bradford, woollen strike of 1825,
III
Bradlaugh, Charles, 289, 370-71
Bradninch, woolcombers in, 34
Brainworkers, inclusion of. 697 ;
organisations of, 503-9
Bramwell, Lord, 279, 363
Branch meeting, description of,
446-8
Brassey, Lord, 269
Brassfounders. See Brassworkers
Index
767
Brass-workers, 323, 353, 358-9,
430-31, 486-8, 744
Braziers, 80, 91
Breeches Makers' Benefit Society, 24
Brentano, Dr. Luigi, 9, 12. 13, 15,
16, 25, 39, 47, 52, 209, 212, 339,
677
Brett, Lord Justice, 2S5
Bricklayers, 125, 169, 223, 226-32,
241. 245, 275, 282, 354, 365, 407,
428-9, 431-3, 559, 744
Bricklayers' and Plasterers' Com-
pany, Dublin, 721-4
Brickmakers, 241, 267-9 ; Hebrew
in Egypt, 2
Brief Institution, 40, 67
Bright, John, 35-6, 178, 247, 293,
382
Brighton Trades Council, 558
Bristol, 14, 33, 35, 53, 133, 243, 252,
350
British and Foreign ConsoUdated
Association of Industry, Human-
ity, and Knowledge, 167
British Association of Steel Smelt-
ers. See Steel Smelters
Broadhead, W., 268-9
Broadhurst, Henry, 240, 285, 289,
295, 311-12, 325, 353, 362-3, 365,
370. 372, 395. 401. 408, 635, 680
Bronte, Charlotte, 89
•Brooklands Agreement, 476
Brooks, J. G., 655
Brougham, Lord, 156, 178
Brushmakers, 14, 45, 75, 84, 91, 438
Buchez, 225
Builders' Labourers, 125, 483
" Builders' Parhament " of 1833,
130 ; of 1918-19, 483, 649
Building Trades, early combina-
tions, 8-1 1 ; lock-out in 1833,
150 ; in i860, 228-32 ; in 1912,
690 ; nine hours movement in,
312-17; statistics of, 407^ 428-9,
431-3, 481-3
Bull & Co., 343
BuUinger, 4
Burdett, Sir Francis, 69, 109
Burgess, Joseph, 412
Burnett, John, 19, 36, 211, 314-15
(life), 316, 325, 347, 368, 423, 530
Burns, John, 298, 375, 383, 385
(life), 387-8, 396, 400, 402-3,
407-13, 419, 490, 636, 682
Burrows, Herbert, 402
Burt, Thomas, 181, 289-90, 296, 307,
340, 342, 362, 510-1 1, 625, 635, 680
Burton, hatters of, 53
Bussy, J. F. Moir, 524
Buxton, Lord, 404
Buxton, Sir T. Fowell, 264
Byron, Lord, 89
Cab-fare regulations, 9
Cabinetmakers, 76-8, 83-4, 136,
243, 248, 290, 389, 432-3, 481,
744-5
Cabmen, 369
" Ca' Canny," 487
Cairns, Earl, 275 l
Calender-men, Glasgow, no
Calhoun, J. C, 167
CaUco Engravers of Manchester, 80
Cahco-printers, 45, 56-7, 70, 75,
79, 90, 121, 193, 436
Callender, W. R., 272
Cambridge, tailors of, 68
Campbell, Alexander, 30, 240, 243,
249-53
Campbell, G. L., 366
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry,
635
Candidatures, independent, 287-9
Canning, 60
Capitahst, elimination of, 673-6
Card and Blomng Room Operatives,
Amalgamated Association of, 435,
475-80. See also Cotton Opera-
tives and Textiles
Carlisle, cotton-weavers of, 82
Carmarthenshire, coal-miners of, 44
Carmen, 439-40
Carpenters, 18, 75, no, 125, 169,
192, 202, 224, '228-32, 245, 254,
259, 265-7, 313. 319, 323-4. 343.
346, 354-5, 391, 415. 432-3, 48^.
744 ; Company of London, 18 ;
of DubUn, 721-4
Carpet-weavers, 112, 224, 435-6
Cartwright, 36
Census of Trade Unionists, 741-750
Central Institute, 593
Chalmers, G., 62
Chamberlain, Joseph, 370, 373
768
Index
Champertors, 67
Champion, H. H., 387, 400
Chandler, F., 354
Channd Isles, etc., T.U. in, 743
Chapel, 27, 74, 489
Character Note, 29, 284
Chartism, 164, 174-8, 649, 653
Checkweigher, 302, 304-6, 466, 489
Chester, hatters of, 53
Chimney-sweeps, 136
Chinese Labour, 691
Chippers and Drillers, 548
Chipping Norton case, 332
Christian SociaUsts, the, 215, 225,
246, 263-4, 707- •S'^^ "'^^° Hughes,
Ludlow and Neale
Churchill, Winston, 494, 501
Cigarmakers, T.U. among, 438
" Citizen Guard," 544
City of Glasgow Bank failure, 345
Civil Service, 507-8 ; Arbitration
Tribunal, 508-9
Clark, W. S., 601, 607, 634
Clayden, A. W., 329
Clerical Workers' Union of Ireland,
473
Clerks, 440, 473, 504-5, 744
Clode, 3, 6
Clothiers, 33-6, 40, 67-8, 151
Clothiers' Community, the, 40
Clothing Trades, statistics of, 428-
429, 436-7
Clothworkers' Company, 5, 33-4
Clyde, depression on, 346 ; engineers
on, 690 ; ferment on, 656, 659 ;
shipyard workers of, 256 ; shorter
day on, 316 ; strike on, in 1877,
343 ; " Weekly Pays " on the,
552
Clyde Workers' Committee, 488,640,
*'59
Clyiies, J. R., 497,' 692
Coaclimakers, 46, 80, 230, 423, 438,
744
Coal Industry Commission, 51 t,
518-22, 648, 662-3
Coal-miners. See Miners
Coal-porters, 18, 439, 500-501
Cobbett, Wm., 9^, 96, 132, 154-5 )
the younger, 253
Cobden, Kixrhard, 178, 383
Cohen, H., 599, 601
Cokemen, 434, 512, 549
Cole, G. D. H., 485, 524, 532, 553,
633. 637, 660
Cole, Percy, 491
Colliery Clerks, 513, 549; Engine-
men, 434, 512,549; Mechanics, 43.^
Combe, Delafield & Co., 150
Combination Acts, 6.^, 251
" Committee Liquor," 203
Common employment, 364-6
Common Rules, 758
Composite Branches, 483
Compositors, 27, 57-8, 77-8, 169,
176, 181, 196, 198-9, 201, 205,
361, 389, 398-9. 415. 437-8. 492-3.
606, 666, 671, 744. See also
Typographical
Conditions of Employment, 754
Confederation Gen6rale de "rravail,
655
Conference of Amalgamated Trades,
263-83
Confiscation of funds proposed, 140
Congress, Trades Union, origin of,
280-81; description of, 561-6:
summons to, 738-40
Congreve, Richard, 269
Connolly, T., 248, 273 ; James.
472-3. 655-7
Conscription, 639-40, 666-7
Consolidated Society of Book-
binders, London. 5ee Bookbinders
Conspiracy, law of, 67, 367, 598 ; to
injure, 59S
Constitution of Labour Party, 697 ;
. of Trade Unions, 716
Consumers, organisation of, 762
Contagious Diseases Acts, 237
Contracting Out, 366
Cook, A. C;., 399
Co-operative Employees, 504, 559,
744 ; Movement, 225, 647, 675,
752-62 ; production, 168, ig^,
225-6, 335-6, 650-51, 659, 707-8;
Society of Smiths. See Smiths;
Union, the, 545, 691 ; Wholesale
Society, 541 ; workshops, 194
Coopers, 74-5, 104, 230, 350, 423,
438, 548, 685
Co-partnership, .'S53
Copper-miners, absence of T.U.
among, 434
Index
769
Cordwainers. See Boot and Shoe
Operatives
Corn Production Act, 475, 498
Costing experts, 761
Cotton-spinners, 7, 41, 56, 81, 92,
116-24, 127, 151-2, 170-71, 176,
181. 191, 226, 259, 307-13. 415-16,
423, 435, 475-80, 744
Cotton-weavers, 56-9, 81-2, 86,
109, 307-13, 344, 435, 475-80
Coulson, Edward, 233 - 40, 248,
252, 255, 282, 362
Coventry, 95
Cowen, Joseph, 316
Cox, Harold, 391, 393
Craft Gilds, 4-21 ; labourers ex-
cluded from, 43
Cranmer, Archbishop, 4
Crawford, William, 296, 303-4, 391
Crayford, cahco-printers of, 193
Cremer, Sir W. R., 248, 289, 682
Criminal Law Amendment Act of
1871, 282-3, 290-91, 364
Crompton, Henry, 265, 278, 282,
284, 286, 298, 338. 362, 374. See
Positivists
Cromwell, combinations reported
to, 3
Crooks, W., 685
Cross, Viscount, 291, 312, 618, 624
Cruikshank, James, 20
Cubitt's, Messrs., strike at, 150
Cunningham, Dr. William, 9, 15, 16,
49, 52, 55. 62, 308
Curriers, 37, 45, 46, 59, 90, 92, 181,
236
Customs officers, 507
Cutlers, 73, 80, 92, 108, 241
Cutlers' Company, 39
Daily Citizen, 689
Daily Herald, 502, 542, 689
Dale, David, 328, 339
Danter, 255, 318
Dartmouth, 34
Davenport, W., 30
Davis, J. E., 251
Davis, R. J., 503
Davis, W. J., 281, 324, 356, 358-9
(life), 368, 391, 395, 401, 554,
601, 680
Davitt, Michael, 473
Defoe, Daniel, 35
Delahaye, Victor, 385
De Leon, Daniel, 656
Demarcation disputes, 247, 353
Democracy, nature of, 704-18 ;
analysis of, 752-62
Deportation of Clyde workers, 640
Deputies, 513, 549
Derby, hatters of, 53 ; potters of,
133 ; " turn-outs " of, 137-8
Devon, clothiers of, 33-5, 68
Devonport, Lord, 501-2
Dilke, Sir Charles, 238, 494, 617
Dilution, 637-43
Direct action, 663-73, 712
Directory of Trade Unions, 244-5
District Committee, 221-2, 449 ;
Councils, 547
District Delegate, 322, 462-3
Dock Foremen and Clerks, London
Society of, 440
Dockers, 401-5, 416, 420, 439, 497-
502, 744
Document, the, 130, 150-51, 164,
193, 215-16, 244, 255
Doherty, John, 107, 117-18, 122, 124
DoUeans, E., 175
Dorchester labourers, 138, 144-8
Dowlais iron workers, 224
Drake, Barbara, 637
Dronfield, William, 240, 252, 257-8
Druitt; 278-9
Drummond, C. J., 398
Drummond, Henry, 277
Drury, John, 184, 186
Dublin, 14, 37, 53, 76. 104, 172, 243,
551. 721-4
Dugdale, 6
Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby, 185-7,
193-5. 277
Dundee, 136
Dunning, T. J., 23, 188, 228, 240,
243, 245, 252, 321
Dunsford, Martin, 34
Durham, coal-miners of, 44, 181-2,
186, 304, 342, 349, 386, 391-2,
511-12, 517
Dyer, Colonel, xiv
Dyers, 100, 243, 436, 478, 480, 552
Eastern Counties Labour Federa-
2 C
770
Index
tion, 405. See also Agricultural
Labourers
Edinburgh, compositors of, 58 ;
trade clubs of, 177; Trades
Council of, 242, 252 ; Uphf)l-
stcrers" Sewers' Union at, 336
Educatiouul Institute of SciHland,
473
Eight Hours Bill, textile agitation
for, in l^(}^-^5, 3og ; general,
387. BQf^-Q'i. 408, 648
Eight hours day, 402-3 ; demanded
in 1834, 151 ; on the railways,
535
Elcho, Lord. See W cmyss. Earl of
Eldon, Lord, 105
Election expenses, 368
Electioneering by Trade Unions,
274-5
Electrical Trades Union, 488, 551
EUzabeth, Act of, 47-9
F;ilenborough, Lord, 59 Co, 144
Ellicott, Dr., Bishop of Gloucester,
Ellis, Sir T. RatcUffe, 530
Ely, Bisliop of, 3
Emblem, .J50
Emigration, 201-2, 328
Employer and Workman Act, 2gi,
6^5
Employers' Associations, service of,
479 ; as combinations, 73
Employers' liability, 364-6, 370,
373
Employers of Labour, National
I'\'dcration of Associated, 326-7
Eraploynunt Exchanges, 646
Engels, Eriedrich, 186
Engineering and Shipbuilding
Lederation, 552-3
Engineers, 174, 176, 178, 196-7,
201, 204-24, 230, 232-4, 245, 255,
259. 261, 313-17, 346, 348. 333,
355. 384-5. 408, 415-16, 420-21,
551. 555. 559. 636, 643, 692,
744 ; statistics of, 407, 428-31,
484-490 ; strike of 1836, joh ;
strike of 185-', 214-16: strike of
i8.)7. 484-5
Engiuenien, 440
Ec|ualisation of funds, t2o
Erie, Sir William. 193, 264, 279
Evans, D , 511
I Evans, Frederick, 523
Eversley, Lord, 228
I Excess Profits Duty, 641
Excise officers, 507-8
I Exeter, 34-5, 13b
Fabian Research Department. Ses
Labour Research Department
Fabian Society, 375, 390, 414. 501 .
642. 662, 680-82, 684
Factory Acts, 679
Factory Acts Reform Association,
310-13
Factory inspectors, 371-2
Fagniez, 3, 7, 8
Fairbairn, Sir W., 84, 205
Fair Trade League, 394-5
" Fair Wages " agitation, 398-9,
558
Farr, Dr. William, 228
Farriers, 46
Farringdon, prosecution of
labourers at, 332
Farwell, Lord Justice, 627
Faulkner, H. V., 175
Fawcett Association, 508
Fawcett. Henry, 228. 238, 312
Federal Council of Secondary School
Associations, 506
Federation of 13ritisk Industries,
545
Federation of the Engineering and
Shipbuilding Trades, 355, 421,
552-3
Federation of Organised Trade
Societies, 356
Felkin, W., 38. 52, 169
Feltmakers' Company, 28. 30. 52-3
Female Umbrella Makers. 337
Fenwick. Charles. 362
Fernehough, Thomas, 260
Ferrand, M.P., 186
Fieldcn, J., 132. 151, 15S
Fielding. Sir John, 54
Figgis, J. N., 611
Filrsmiths of Sheffield, 80
lindlay. Sir George, 525
Finlaison, 268
Flannel-weavers of Rochdale. 127
Fla.x lioughcrs, 473; worker*, 133,
435-t»
Index
771
Flint Glass Makers, 181, 183-4, i97.
199-202, 228, 230, 379-80, 423,
744
Forbes, Archibald, 329
Foreign policy of Labour Party,
695-6
Foremen, 440, 506
Forest of Dean Miners' Association,
434. See also Miners
Forster, W. E., 228
Foster, Thomas, 118-20; (another)
648
Foxwell, Professor H. S., 58, 155,
157, 162, 308
Framework-knitters, 14, 38-9, 51,
51-2, 62, 73, 88-9, 94, 121
Franchise, 368, 372, 624, 672 ^
Prankhn, Benjamin, 27
Free Colliers of Scotland, 20
Freemasons, 19
French Polishers, 432-3
Friendly Benefits, 222, 445, 620-21
Friendly Societies, 19, 24 ; Act for,
261
Friendly Society of Oddfellows, 19
Friendly Society of Operative
Stonemasons. See Stonemasons
Friendly Union of IMechanics, 208
Friendly United Smiths of Great
Britain and Ireland, 207. See also
Smiths
Friziers, 91
Frost, Williams, and Jones, New-
port Chartists, 177
Froude, J. A., 48
Furnishing Trades, 48 1
Fynes, Richard, 90, 124, 181, 186
Gaevernitz, von Schulze, 339, 414
Galloway, 61, 205
Galton, F. W., 23, 97, 150
Gammage, R. G., 175
Gaiibaldi, 247
Garment Workers. See Tailors
Garton Foundation, 648
Gascoyne, Colonel, 71
Gas-stokers, London (1872), 284-5 !
strike of (1834), 138. {i88'8)
395. See Gas-workers
Gast, John, 84-5, 107, in, 115
Gas-workers, 402, 406, 420, 439,
497. 499
Gateshead Trades Council, 561
Geddes, Sir Auckland, 536-7
Geddes, Sir Eric, 536-8
Geldart, W. M., 609, 634
General Federation of Trade Unions
554-7, 603-4, 700
General Labourers' National Coun-
cil, 499
General Railway Workers' Union,
405-6, 524, 530. See also Rail-
waymen
General staff, need for, 546
General Union of Carpenters. See
Carpenters
General Union of Sheet Metal
Workers. See Sheet Metal
Workers
General Union of Textile Workers,
480
General Workers, 497-502
George, D. Lloyd, 509, 518, 522,
527. 537-9, 541. 543-4. 645. 692,
694-5
George, Henry, 375-6. 389
Gierke, O., 611-12
Giffen, Sir Robert, 424
Gig-mill, 48
Gild of St. George, Coventry, 6
Girdlestone, Canon, 329
Gladstone, W. E., 248, 262, 284-6,
302, 365
Glasgow, cahco-printers of, 75 ;
cotton operatives of, 56, 58-9, 89,
170-71 ; gilds of, 14 ; labourers'
society in, 417 ; stonemasons of,
347 ; Trades Council of, 240,
242-3, 252-3, 258, 280 ; violent
Trade Unionism of, 165
Glass-bottle Makers, 259, 423, 441,
744
Glass - workers. See FUnt Glass
Makers and Glass-bottle Makers
Glaziers of London, 66
Gloucestershire, clothiers of, 33-5 ;
weavers of, 50 ; woollen -workers
of. 33-4. 50
Glovers, 43, 437
Goderich, Lord. See Ripon, Mar-
quis of
Gold, Silver, and Kindred Trades
Society, 551
Goldasti, 20
n^
Index
Goldbeaters, 37, qi
Ciompcrs, Samuel, 356
Gorgon, the, 99 ■*
Government of Industry, 752-62
Government officials, 507-8
Graham, Sir James, 60, 185
Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 386,
682
Grain-porters, 501
Grand National Consolidated Trades
Union, 125, 417; rules of, 725-
733
(irey. Sir George, 185
Grinders, So, 260
Gross, Dr., 15
Grote, George, 178
Guild Socialism, 548, 660-1
Guilds. See Craft Gilds
Guile, Daniel, 233-40, 238 (life of),
252, 291, 362
Gurney, J. and W. B., 89
Gurney, Russell, 275
Haddleton, 197
Hal6vy. lilie, 648
Halifax, woollen-workers of, 35
Hall, Rev. Robert, 94
Halliday, Sir Leonard, 4
Halliday, Thomas, 289
Hallsworth, Joseph, 503
Halsbury, Lord, 610, 614
Hamilton, A. H. A., 33
Hammond, J. L. and B., 70-71, 82,
86, 89, 100, 105, 112, 115, 144
Hanley Trades Council, 558
Hansom, 130
Hardie, J. Keir, 396, 681-4, 688
Harford, E., 390
Harrel, Sir David, 530
Harrison, Frederic, 246, 262, 263,
265, 267, 270-71, 273-4, 275, 279,
284, 286. 295-7, 298, 362, 374,
610. See also Positivists
Harvey, George, 5 1 1
Hasbach, Dr. W., 329, 405
Hatters, 28, 30, 45, 52-3, 68, 90,
437. See also Felt makers' Com-
pany
Headlain, Rev. S. D., 399
Heath. F. G., 320
Henderson, Arthur, 490, 529-30,
666, 669, 6S0, 685, 692, 694-5, 699
Hen.son, Gravener, 38, 77, 8r, 80,
94, 100. 105
Hepburn, Tommy, 124
Herald of the Rights uj Industry, 7 /
158
Herbert, Hon. Auberon, 32^
Hewins, W. A. S., 49
Hexham, hatters of, 53
Hibbert and Piatt. 2 1 4
Hill, Frank, 14, 228
Hill, Frederic, 257, 27a
Hilles, Richard, 4
Hobhouse, r>enjamin, 69, 70 •
Hobhouse, John Cam, iz2
Hobson, S. G., 660
Hodge, John, 491, 692, 695
■Hodges, Frank, 517, 673-5, 715
Hodgskin, T., 162
Holders-up. See Boilermakers
Holland, John, 124
Holland, Lord, 70
Holyoake, G. J., 302
Holytown, miners of, 193
Hornby v. Close, 262
Hosiery-workers, 435-6. See also
Framework-knitters
Hour, payment by the, 245-6
House of Call, 69, 77, 445
Hovell, Mark, vi, 158, 164, 170,
175
Howell, George, 12-13, ^7. 27, 30,
40-41,65, 71, 100, 105, 139, 144,
170. 173. 188, 195, 228, 240, 245.
248, 255. 275, 281, 285-6, 289.
291-2, 295, 298, 325. 329-30, 352.
361. 370. 372, 391. 395. 416,
599, 601, 616-17, 623, 665, 682,
748
Howick, Lord, 146
Hoxie, R. F., 717
Hozier, J. H. C., 393
Huddersfield, 125
Hughes, Judge Thomas, QC, 216,
228, 244, 246, 265, 270, 274-5.
282, 290, 263-4, 341- See also
Christian Socialists
Hughson. David. 32, 34
Hull, ropcmakcrs of, 91 ; Trade
Unionism at, 136
Hume, James Deacon. 15S
Hume, Joseph, M.P., 72, 81, 09-
108, 142, 186, 251, 277, 415
Index
77^
Humphrey, A. W., 237, 275, 289,
604, 680
Humphries, E., 195
Hunt, D. R. C, 599
Hunt, Henry, 96, 164
Hunter, Thomas, 170
Huskisson, W., M.P., 60, 105-6
Hutchinson, Alexander, 153, 207-8
Hutton, R. H., 228, 246
Hutton, W., 177
Huysmans, Camille, 666, 669, 670
Hyde, spinners' strike at, iiy
Hyett, W. H., iii
Hyndman, H. M., 376-7, 387, 400,
409-11
■' Illegal men," 59
Incorporation of Trade Unions, 596
Independent Labour Party, 384,
652, 680-84, 692
Independent Order of Engineers
and Machinists. See Engineers
Index numbers, 339
Industrial Conscription, 639-40
Industrial Courts Act, 19 19, 643
Industrial Remuneration Confer-
ence, 380
Industrial Unionism, 656-9
Industrial Unions, 548-50
Industrial Workers of the World, 655
Industries, difficulty of delimiting,
714
Ingram, Dr. J. K., 26
Initiation Parts, 149
Injunctions, 599, 600, 688
Inspectors, 504-5
Insurance Agents, 440, 507
Inter-Allied Conferences, 693-6
Interlocutor, 581
International Association of Work-
ing-men, 235-6, 248, 297, 316,
379, 396-7, 421. 666, 693-6
International Federations of Trade
Unions, 555-6
Intimidation, 597
Ireland, laws in, 68-9 ; Trade
Unionism in, 472-3
Irish Bank Officials' Association, 505
Irish Clerical Workers' Union, 505
Irish Labour Party, 473
Irish Railway Workers' Trade
Union, 524
Irish Teachers' Society, 473
Irish Textile Workers' Federation,
.473
Irish Trades Union Congress, 473
Iron and Steel Trades Confedera-
tion, 492, 552, 749
Iron and Steelworkers, Associated
Society of. See Ironworkers
Iron Forgers, Associated Fraternity
of, or Old Smiths, 205
Ironfounders, 78, 121, 174, 176,
198-9, 200-203, 205, 213, 226, 233,
245, 261, 319-20, 348-9, 353. 391,
415, 429-30, 488, 685, 692. 744
Irongrinders, 744
Ironmoulders. See Ironfounders
Iron shipbuilders. See Boiler
makers
Iron Trade — Midland Wages Board,
734-5 ; North of England Wages
Board, 734-5
Ironworkers, 240, 259, 273, 324,
339, 349. 430-31. 491-2, 734-5 ; of
Dowlais, 224 ; of Staffordshire,
256 ; sliding scales of, 734-5
Jackson and Graham, 290
Jackson, Col. Raynsford, 344
James, 37
James of Hereford, Lord, 206, 493,
610, 615-16, 618, 626
Jeffrey, Lord, 72
Jevons, H. Stanle}' (the younger),
186, 511, 516
Jewish Unions, 478
Joiners. See Carpenters
Joint Board, 700
Joint Committees. See Arbitration,
Whitley Councils
Jones, Benjamin, 225, 708
Jones, Daniel, 734
Jones, Lloyd, 243, 298, 329, 340-41
(life). 510
Jones, W, C, 341
Journahsts, 493, 507
Journeyman Fraternities, 4-9
Journeymen Steam Engine and
Machine Makers and Millwrights
Friendly Society, 204-20. See
also Engineers
Jude, Martin, 182, 299
Junta, the, 233-98
774
Index
Jupj), i8
Jury service, 367-8, 372
Justices of the Peace. 372, 594
Kane, John, 240 (life of), 273, 286,
289, 299, 324, 339
Karslakc, Sir John, 275
Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, 228
KecHng, F., 500
Keelmen, 44
Kenney, Rowland, 524, 527
Kettel, F. E.. 329
Kettle, Sir Rupert, 338-9
Kidderminster, 112; carpet-weavers
of, 224
Kitchen-range, etc.. Fitters' Union,
323
Knight, Charles, 141, 178
Knight, Robert, 322, 324, 351, 355,
378, 421, 554
Knights of Labour, 135
Laboratory workers, 506
Labour and the New Social Order,
679, 697
Labour Commission, 595-6, 602,
650. 735
Labour Department, 596
Labour Electof, The, 387
Labour Electoral Committee, 680
Labour League, London and Coun-
ties, 417, ^39
Labour members, characteristics of,
701-2
Labour Party, 604
Labour Representation League,
287-9, 680
Labour Research Department, 225,
542, 56T, 751
Labour Standard, The, 298
Labour Time, 162-3
Labourers, no early organisation
among, 43 ; statistics of, 428-9,
438-40; increase of, 497-502
Lacemakers, 435-6, 441. 559
Ladies' Shoemakers' Society, 238
Laisser-faire, 50
Lanarkshire, cotton-weavers of. 58,
170
Lancashire I'cdcration of "Protection
Societies, 47b
Lancashire Miners, 182, 433, 511
Land Nationahsation, 389, 390, 395
Langford, 32
Lansbury, George, 6S9
Larkin, James, 472-3
Lathom, R. M., 080
Laundresses, T.U., 336
Law, Bonar, 668
Law reforms, 367-8
Lawrence, F. Pethick, 681
Lawrence, Miss Susan, 494, 496
Laws, Mr., 287
Layton, W. T., 527
Lead miners, absence of T.U. among,
Leathergrounders, 92
Leatherworkers, 437, 552
Lee, H. W., 501
Leech, H. J., 293
Leeds, 35 ; clothing trade of, 35,
40, 127; Clothiers' Union, 133,
147
Leeds, Huddersfield, and Bradford
District Union, 147
Legal assaults, 597-634
Legal Minimum Wage, under Trade
Boards Act, 494-5 ; under Corn
Production Act, 498 ; under
Mines Act, 514-16
Leicester, 94, 125, 137 ; hosiery
workers of, 335 ; Trades Council,
558 ; woolcombers of, 36
Levi, Leone, 424
Levine, Louis, 655
Lewis, Sir G. C, 247
Liberty, analysis of, 757
Lichfield, Earl of, 254
Life Assurance Agents. See Insur-
ance Agents
Linen Weavers, 436
Link, The, 402
Liquor, 448 ; allowance, 203-4
Litchfield, R. B., 246
Liverpool, building trades of, 12R-
130 ; dockers of, 405 ; hatters
of, 53 ; ropemakers of, 91 ;
shipwrights of, 551 ; Trades
Council, 242-3, 252. 354-5
Liverpool, Lord, 105
Liverpool Sailmakers' Friendly
Association of Shipwrights. See
Shipwrights
Index
775
Liverpool, Trades Guaxdian Associa-
tion of, 243
Lloyd, C. M., 160
Local Governnient elections, 305,
399. 413 ; employees, 508 ; suc-
cesses, 703-4
Local versus Central Administra-
tion, 714
Lock-out, the, 255-6 ; of agricul-
tural labourers, 332, 334
London and Counties Labour
League, 417, 439
London Carpenters' Company, 18 ;
city companies of, 14 ; coal-
porters of, 18 ; early combina-
tions in the City of, 2, 3 ; frame-
work knitters of, 14, 38, 51-2 ;
joiners' company of, 18 ; ship-
wrights' company of, 18 ; Trades
Council, 231, 236, 238, 285, 333,
558-60 ; woodsawyers of, 18
London Consolidated Society of
Bookbinders, 188, 196
London Society of Compositors, 181,
399. 415. 437-8, 492
London Working Men's Association,
298, 680
Londonderry, Lord, 90, 166, 186
Longe, F. D., 228
Looms, renting of, forbidden, 48
Loveless, George, John, and James,
144-6, 148
Lovett, Samuel, 96
Lovett, William, 84, 114, 145, 156,
157, 172, 174
Lowe, Robert. See Sherbrooke,
Lord, 285
Lu craft, Benjamin, 235, 289
Luddites, the, 87-9
Ludlow, J. M., 14, 26, 216, 228,
246, 264, 341. See Christian
SociaUsts
Lushington, Sir Godfrey,- 228, 246,
264
Lushington, Vernon, 264
Macarthur, Miss Mary, 494, 496
Macclesfield, hatters of, 30
M'Connel and Co., 308
M'CuUoch, J. R., 23, 99, 197
Macdonald, Alexander, 240, 249,
252, 277, 286, 289, 290, 299, 300
(life of), 301-7, 338, 342, 362, 393
510, 680
MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 23, 337.
529, 666, 669, 684-5, 688, 699
M'Gowan, Patrick, 118, 120
Machine, Engine, and Iron Grin-
ders' Society, 744-7
Machine Printers, 744. See also
Compositors
Machine Workers. See Engineers
Machinerv, export of, 100, 103
M'Hugh, Edward, 582
MacManus, A., 619
Madox, T., 612
Maitland, F. W., 611-12
Maitland, General, 88
Man, The, 134 ^
Management, analysis of, 752
Manchester — Association of T.U.
Officials, Manchester and District,
324 ; brickmakersof,268 ; building
trades of, 130-31, (strike of 1846)
193 ; carpenters of, 343 ; cotton-
spinners of, 81 ; lengthening of
hours at, 348 ; painters of, 275 ;
Trades Council, 243, 280, 55S-60,
738-40
Mandt^us, 600
Manley, Thomas, 22
Mann, Tom, 383-4 (life), 396, 402,
406-7, 409, 412-14, 419, 490,
595-6, 651-2, 657-8
Manners, Lord John, 186
Manning, Cardinal, 332, 404
Marcroft family, the, 152
Marine' Engineers' Union. See
Engineers
Marlborough, Duke of, 332
Marshall, James, 170
Martineau, Harriet, 141
Marx, Karl, 162, 235, 297, 367, 376,
389
Masons. See Stonemasons
Master and Servant, law in 1844,
185-6 ; Act of 1867, 249-53
Match girls, London strike of, 402
Maudsley, 61
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 228
Mavor, James, 524
Mawdsley, James, 379, 479, 596
Mawdsley, Thomas, 311
Maxwell, WiUiam, 598
11^
Index
May, John, 33
Mayhevv, 11
Mechanics' Friendly Union Institu-
tion, 208
Mechanics' Magazine, the, 197
Medico-Political Union, 506-7
Melbourne, Lord, 138-48
Memorandum on War Aims, 695
Memorial of Freedom and Peace,
593
Menger, Anton, 155, 157, 162
Mercantile Marine Offices, Super-
intendents of, 507
Merchant Shipping Acts, 607
Merchant Taylors' Company, 3, 6
Mersey Quay and Railway Carters'
Union. See Carmen
Merton College buildings, 10, 11
M.ess, H. A., 500
Middleton, J. S., 691
Midland Iron Trade Board, 734
Miles, Wm., 185
Military Service Acts, 639-40
Mill, James, 96, 157
Mill, John Stuart, 287, 617
Millers, 59, 438 ; of Kent, 59-60
Millmen. See Ironworkers
Millwrights, 45, 69, 83-4, 92, 204-6
Miners, 415, 510-22, 624, 690 ;
Amalgamated Association of, 289 ;
Co-operative Production and, 335;
Association of, G. B. and I., 181,
182, 186, 299, 517-18 ; Eight
Hours Act, 686 ; Federation,
393-4, 408, 433-4, 510-22, 538,
549-50. 553. 555. 648, 66r, 662-3,
665, 668, 673-5, 685, 715 ; Mini-
mum Wage Act, 687 ; of Ayr-
shire, 681 ; of Carmarthenshire,
44 ; of Durham, 44, 124, 160,
182-3, 296, 304, 335, 338, 342,
349. 386, 301, 392, 434. 5"-i2,
517, 744 ; of Holytown, 193 ; of
Lancashire, 111-12, 123, 143, 182-
183, 188, 392-3, 433. 5" ; of
Lothian, 434 ; of Midlands, 349,
393. 511 ; of Monmouthshire, 89 ;
of Northumberland, 124, 127,
182, 296, 335, 338, 340, 342, 347,
349,386, 391-2, 433, 511-12; of
Nottingham, 258: of Scotland,
192. 39i, 434, 511 ; of Somerset,
44; of Staffordshire, 124, 511;
of South Wales, 89, 343, 34<),
434, 511, 640, 690; of York-
shire, 124,182,228,230,256, 301-2,
304-5. 335. 338, 349. 370, 392-3.
433. 510-11, 522, 744 ; reorganisa-
tion of, in 1858, 300-7 ; statistics
of, 407, 428-9, 433-4 ; strike of
i8io, 90. See also Iron-miners.
Lead-miners, Copper-miners
Miners' Attorney-General, the, 1S3
Miners' Next Step, the, 657
Minimum to Sliding Scale, 340-42
Minimum Wage Commission, 648
Alining Association of Great Britain,
553
Ministry of Reconstruction, 647-8
Mogul Case, 598
Molestation, 597
Moncricff, Lord, 343
Moore, Peter, 251
Morley, Samuel, 310, 332
Morris, Wilham, 377
Morrison, James, 131
Mottershead, 289
Mulineaux, Thomas, 30
Mundella, A. J., 264-5, 274-5, 282,
288, 290, 310. 338-9, 362
Municipal Employees' Association,
508
Munitions, Levy, 641 ; Ministry of,
637-43 ; Munitions of War Acts,
637. 643 ; Tribunals, 639, 64J,
646
Munro, Prof. J. E. Crawford, 308,
734-7
Murphy, J. T., 490, 659
Musical Instrument Makers, 92
Musicians, 744
Mutual Association of Coopers.
See Coopers
Mutuality, 487
Nash, Vaughan, 404
National Amalgamated Furnishing
Trades Association, 551, 744. See
also Furnishing, French Polishers,
Cabinetmakers, Upholsterers
National Amalgamated Sailors' and
Firemen's Union. See Sailors
National Association for the Pro-
tection of Labour, 120-24
Index
777
National Association of Miners, 299-
300
National Association of Operative
Plasterers. See Plasterers
National Association of United
Trades for the Protection of
Labour, 186-95
National Association of United
Trades, 277
National Companies, 160
National Cordvvainers' Society, 192
National Council of Colliery
Workers, 550
National Federation of Building
Trade Operatives, 482-3 ; of
Collier}' Enginemen, 550 ; of
Colliery Mechanics, 550 ; of
Deputies, 550 ; of General
Workers, 499 - 500 ; of INIine
Managers, 550 ; of Professional
Workers, 506-7 ; of Women
Workers, 495
National Guilds, 660-61
National Industrial Conference,
648
National Insurance Act, 475, 495,
498, 503, 555. 636, 689
National Society of Amalgamated
Brassworkers. See Brassworkers
National Transport Workers' Feder-
ation, 500-502, 538, 543
National Typographical Associa-
tion, 181, 191
National Union of Boot and Shoe
Operatives. See Boot and Shoe
Operatives
National Union of Clerks, 505 ; of
Dock Labourers. See Dockers ;
of General Workers, 692. See
also Gas - workers ; of Miners,
300-307, 511-12; of Railway
Clerks, 524 ; of Railwaymen,
530-46. See also Railwaymen ;
of Teachers, 440, 473, 506 ; of
the Working Classes, 156
National United Trades' Associa-
tion for the Employment of
Labour, 192
NationaUsation, 651 ; of the coal
supply, 517-22; of Mines BiU,
662-3 ; of railways, 534.
Navvies, 439. See also Labourers
1 Neale, E. Vansittart, 216, 341.
See Christian SociaUsts
j Neale, Professor, 264
I New Age, the, 660
New Sarum, Cordwainers at, 57
"New Unionism," the, of 1833-34,
153-67; of 1845-52, 195-204; of
1889-90, 414-21
Newcastle, potters of, 133 ; rope-
makers of, 91 ; Trades Council,
252
Newcastle ■; on - Tyne — engineers'
strike at, 315-16; gilds of, 14;
shoemakers at, 24
Newton, George, 258
Newton, William, 206-24, 234,
243, 680
Newton - le - Willows, trial of engi-
neers of, 209-10
Nine Hours' Bill, 311-12, 625
Nine Hours' Day, 245, 391, 397 ;
attack on, 347, 355 ; in building
trades, 228-32 ; movement in
engineering and building, 313-17
Nixon, J., 340
Non-Unionists, 441, 443; refusal to
work wdth, 295-6
Normal Day, the, 246
NormanseU, John, 305
North of England Manufactured
Iron Board, 734-5
Northern Counties' Amalgamated
Association of Weavers, 423, 478
Northern Star, The, 166, 174-7,
181-2, 186, 216
Northumberland iVIiners, 181-2, 304,
340, 342, 347. 349, 386, 391-2,
511-12, 625, 744
Notes and Queries, 34
Nottingham, 52 ; framework knit-
ters of, 52 ; Hosiery Board, 338 ;
stockingers of, 62 ; Trades
Council, 252, 558
O'Brien, J. Bronterre, 178
Obstruction, 597
O'Connell, Daniel, 148, 171, 173
O'Connor, Fergus, M.P., 174-5,
177-8, 182, 188. See Northern
Star
Odger, George, 233-98, 238 (hfe),
243, 245, 247-8, 361-2, 680
778
Index
O'Grady, J., 683
Oldham, cotton operatives of, 307 ;
strike of, in 1834, 151-2 ; cotton
spinners of, 41, 559 ; strike of, in
1871, 310 ; engineers of, 214
" One Big Union," 114
Onslow, Serjeant, 61-2
Operative Society of Bricklayers.
See Bricklayers
Operative, The, 213
Orage, A. R., 660
Osborne Judgement, 608-34, ^86
Osborne, W. V., 608-9, 628
Ouseburn Engine works, 335
Outrages, Glasgow, 165, 170-71 ;
Manchester, 268 ; Sheffield, 259-
260, 268
Overlap. See Demarcation
Overlookers, 477
Overmen, 434, 513, 549
Over-steaming, 679
Overtime, 317 ; in Government
Departments, 390-91 ; prevalence
of, 348
Owen, Robert, 130, 132, 134-5,
154-64, 167-8, 177, 251, 341,
409-10, 418-19
Owenism, 653, 707
Oxford, Cordwaincrs at, 5
Pacifists, the, 691-6
Packing-case Makers, 432
Painters, 125, 275, 432-3, 481, 548 ;
of Dublin, 721-4 ; of Liverpool,
128 ; of London, 66
Paisley, operatives at, 23 ; weavers
of, 23
Papermakers, 68, 77, 90, 92, 438, 493
Paris, Comte de, 272
Parker, James, 692, 698
Parliamentary Committee of Trades
Union Congress, 361, 554-6, 700 ;
cotton officials demur to alliance
with, 310 ; origin of, 281, 283
Parnell, Sir Henry, 172-3
Particulars Clause, 679
Patent laws, 368-9
Paterson, Mrs., 336-7 (life)
Patrimony in apprenticeship, 83
Patternmakers, 2.05, 353, 430, 488,
551; society formed, 322;
statistics of, 745, 749
Payment by Results, 643 ; in
engineering, 485-7
Payment of members, 368, 374, 631
Peasant proprietorship, 368, 389-
390, 395
Pease, E. R., 414, 680
Peel, Sir Robert (the elder), 57, 60 ;
(the younger), 139
Pemberton, Benjamin, 721-2
Pension Committee, 594, 646
Penty, A. J., 660
Percy, M., 511
Perthshire, 136
"Philanthropic Hercules," 114
Pianoforte Makers, 230
Picketing, 278, 598, 607 ; legalisa-
tion of, 291
Picton, Sir J. A., 40
Piecers, 435 ; associations of, 7
Piecework Lists in cotton industry,
307-9
Pilots, 440
Pinmakers, Corporation of, 42
Pioneer, or Trades Union Magazine,
The, 131
Pipemakers, 91
Pit Committee, 521
Pitt, William, 69, 71
Place, Francis, 32, 61, 73, 84-5, 89,
94, 96-110, 114, 117, 156, 159,
175. 251. 415. 416
Plasterers, 125, 354, 432-3. 744 ; of
Dublin, 172, 721-4,
Platers' Helpers, 353-4, 360
Plimsoll, S., 354, 370
Ploughmen's Union, Perthshire, 136
Plumbers, 125, 169, 316, 348, 429,
432-3, 481, 744
Podmore, Frank, 130, i6o
Police Union, 509
Political expenditure, 632
Pollock, Sir F., 597
Poor Man's Advocate, The, 117,
120
Poor Man's Guardian, The, 114, 134,
136, 142-3. 155
Porters, 442
Positivists, 246, 262-4. See Beesly,
Crompton, and Harrison
Post Office annuities, 248, 296-7 ;
employees, 507-8, 539 ; Savings
Bank, 262
Inde'
779
Post Office workers, 440^ 744 ;
union of, 508, 661
Postal and Telegraph Clerks' Asso-
ciation, 507-8, 662
Postmen's Federation, 507-8
Potter, Edmund, 274
Potter, George, 231
Potter, George, 248, 252, 254-5,
272-3, 289, 298, 361, 680
Potters, 133, 147, 168-9, 181, 185,
192, 201, 438, 552 ; and co-
operative production, 336 ; of
Staffordshire, 123 ; of Wolver-
hampton, 143; Union, 181, 197
Potters' Examiner, The, 197, 262
Precious metals, workers in, 431, 551
Premium Bonus System, 643
Pressmen, 27 ; prosecution of, 78.
See Compositors
Preston, carpenters of, 75 ; cotton-
spinners' strike of 1836, 169;
gilds of, 14
Price, Rev. H., 112
Price, L. L., 338, 736
Printers. See Compositors, Press-
men, and Typographical
Printing Trades, statistics of, 428,
437-8, 744-9
Prior, J. D., 240, 324, 362-3, 372
Prison Officers' Federation, 507
Production for use, 709
Professional Association, 711-12
Profiteering Act, 675
Profit-sharing, 403
Publicity, use of, 222-3
Puddlers. See Iron-workers
Pugh, Arthur, 491
Purcell, A., 560
Quarrymen, 433-4
Quittance Paper, 208.
Radstock Miners' Association. See
Miners, Somersetshire
Rae, Sir William, 95
Railway Clerks' Association, 504-5,
523- 534. 539. 545. 661, 744
Railway Telegraph Clerks' Associa-
tion, 523
Railway Working Men's Benefit
Society, 523
Railwaymen, 365, 390, 407, 439,
442, 504-5, 522-46, 550, 559,
600-634, 661, 666, 684, 687, 690,
744 ; statistics of, 407, 744-9
Railway Women's Guild, 497
Ramsey, conference at, 117
Rattening, 260
Raynes, Francis, 89
Razor-grinders, 184, 343
Reade, Charles, 257
" Red Van " Campaign, 405
Reform Act of 1832, 155-6, 177;
of 1867, 248 ; of 1918, 698
Registrar of Friendly Societies,
Chief, 261, 423, 619
Renals, E., 339
Rennie, 84
Representative actions, 602
Restoration of Trade Union condi-
tions, 642-3
Restraint of trade, 67, 262, 617
Revolution in Thought, 649-76
Rhondda, 514
Ribbon-weavers, Coventry, 95
Ricardo, David, 178
Richmond the spy, 89
Rick-burning, 144
Riley's Memorials, 3, 6
Ripon, Marquis of, 215, 244
Rites of admission, 127"
Roberts, G. H., 666, 692, 698
Roberts, W. P., 182-5, 210, 510
Rochdale, flannel-weavers of, 127;
Pioneers, 177, 225
Roebuck, J. A., 148
Rogers, J. E. Thorold, 10, 49, 56
RoUit, Sir Albert, 501
Roman Cathohc Unions, 478
Ropemakers, 91, 438
Rose, George, 61, 70
Rosebery, Lord, 374
Rosenblatt, F. F., 175
Rosslyn, Lord, 108
Rotherhithe Watermen, 11
Rowlands, J., 682
Rowlinson, John, 208
Ruegg, A. H., 599
Rules, Trade Union, 651
Rutland, Duke of, 332
Ryan, W. P., 473
Saddlers, 92 ; of London, 3
Sadler, Michael, 123
780
Index
Sailmakers, 46, 120, 430
Sailors, 405-6, 438, 440, 500-501,
607, 665 ; on North-East Coast,
104, 106, 108
St. Leonards, Lord, 230
Salisbury, bootmakers of, 57
Samuel, Herbert, 508
Sankey, Mr. Justice, 518-22, 668
Saturday half-holiday, 229 ; Old-
ham Spinners' strike for, 310
Saw-grinders, 260
Sawyers, 433
Scale Beam-makers, 92
Scalemakers, 92
Schoenlank, Dr. Bruno, 25
Scissorsmiths, 39, 80
Scott, W'., 124
Scottish Farm Servants' Union,
49S-9
Scottish National Operative Tailors'
Society. See Tailors
Scottish Society of Railway Ser-
vants, 524-5
Scottish Typographical Association,
181, 423, 437, 482. See also
Compositors
Scottish United Operative Masons,
196
Seagoing Engineers' Union. See
Engineers
Seaham, 166
Secondary School Teachers, 506
Secular Education, 628
Self-governing Workshops, 225
Selley, Ernest, 329, 405
Selsby, 209-10, 234
Senior, Nassau, 103, 139-41, 173
Serfdom of miners, 89
Sewing-machine, introduction of,
228
Shackleton, Sir D., 685
Shaeu, Koscoe & Co., 275
Shaftesbury, Lord, 293, 434
Shale Oil-workers, 434
Shaw, Lord, 626
Shearmen of Dundee, 136 ; of Wilt-
shire, 144
Sheet Metal-workers, 431
Sheflield, 94 ; carpenters of, 232,
236 ; conference at, 257 ; cutlery
made, 39 ; gilds of, 14 ; Mercan-
tile and Manufacturing Union,
73,80; outrages at, 259-61, 263,
268-9; prosecution at, 184-5;
Trades Council, 242-3, 252, 280,
299; United Trades of, 184,
187
Shepton Mallet, woollen-workers of,
51
Sherbrooke, Lord, 285
Sheridan, R. B., 57, 71
Ship Constructors' and Shipwrights'
Association, 551. See also Ship-
wrights
Shipton, George, 240, 290, 298, 325,
331, 362, 395, 406, 408
Shipwrights, 45, 77, 247, 353,
429-30, 490-91, 551 ; of Deptford,
85 ; of Liverpool, 39-40, 71 ; of
London, 104, no : of Newcastle,
106 ; of the Clyde, 256
Shirland Colliery, 335
Shirt and Collar-makers, Women's
Society of, 336
Shoemakers' wages in London in
1669, 21 ; of Wisbech, early
combination of, 3
Sholl, S., 37. 55
Shop Assi-stants, 440, 503-4, 744 ;
of Sheffield, 109 ; organisation
among, 136-7; statistics of, 745-
749
Shop Stewards, 488-90, 659, 690
Shopmen, Railway, 531
Shorrocks, Peter, 2 7 8-9
Short Time Committees, 194
Show Stewards, 716
Sidgwirk, Henry, 308
Sigismund, the Emperor, 20
Silk-weavers, 37, 54-5, 66, 68, "98.
112, 121, 435-6; at Coventry,
95 ; at Spitalficlds, 37 ; at
Dublin, 37
Silversmiths, 80, 91, 551
Simpson, Mrs., 141
Six Acts, the, 95
Six Hours' Day, 517-22
Skelton, O. D., 414
Slaters, 432
Slesser, H. H., 601, 607, 634
Sliding Scales, 338-42, 391, 510,
734-7
Slosson, P. W., 175
Smart, W., 511
Index
781
Smillie, R., 513
Smith, Adam, 23, 49, 55, 73, 162
Smith, Adolphe, 379
Smith, Frank, 681
Smith, Sidney, 216, 287, 347
Smith, Sir H. Llewellyn, 404
Smith, Toulmin, 8
Smiths, 46, 121, 205, 207-8, 213,
323. 430-31. 487-8, 491, 744 ; early
clubs of, 46. See Blacksmiths and
Engineers
Snowden, Philip, 688, 699
Social Contract, 674, 715
Social Democratic Federation, 376-
377. 384-5. 387-9. 400. 409-14.
652, 685
Social Science Association Report,
14. 23. 227-8
SociaUsm, revival of, 374-414
Sociahst Labour Party, 659
SociaUst league, 388
Society for National Regeneration,
132
Society for obtaining Parliamentary
Rehef, 62
Somers, Robert, 272
Somerset, clothiers of, 33-5 ; coal-
miners of, 44 ; weavers of, 49,
51, 65 ; woollen-workers of, 33-4,
49, 51
South Metropolitan Gas Company,
403
South Wales, depression in, 343 ;
miners of, 511, 514, 640, 690,
692 ; ferment among, 657, 659
Sparkes, Malcolm, 483, 648
Spitalfields, 37, 54-5, 61, 66, 98,
112
Spyers, T. G., 596
Stabihsation of Wages, 643
Staffordshire, iron-workers of, 256
Stalybridge, cotton-spinners of, 2
Standard of Life, the, 303, 369
" Standardisation " on the railways,
535-46
Stationers' Company, 27
Stationmasters, 504-5
Statistics, 422-44, 741-50
Status, rise in, 634-6
Statute of Apprentices, 47-9 ; repeal
of, 57-61. See Apprentices
Statute of Labourers, 250
Steadman, W. C, 362, 684
Steam-engine makers, 203, 205.
See Engineers
Steel-smelters, 430, 491-2, 552, 559,
692, 744
Steffen, Gustav, 86
Stephen, J. Fitzjames, 70, 279
Stephens, Rev. J. R., 302, 309
Stevedores, 403
Stockholm, 694
Stocking Makers' Association, 52
Stockingers. See Framework-
knitters
Stockport, cotton-spinners of, 41
Stone, Gilbert, 511
Stonemasons, 125, 127, 149, 151,
166, 172, 176, 184, 191, 196, 199,
200, 202, 213, 223, 226-32, 241,
243, 248, 274, 277, 313, 316,
319-20, 343, 347, 348-9, 354,
383, 408, 429, 432-3, 744 ; early
combinations among, 8 ; Friendly
Society of Operative, 8 ; of
Scotland, 174; of Sheffield, 80
Stonemasons' Fortnightly Circular,
The, 185, 196, 202
Strike, first use of the word, 46 ;
" in Detail," 199-200 ; origin of
the term, 46 ; the General, 163-4,
658, 671-3 ; the right to, 664
Strikes of 1876-89, 347 ; in 1891-99,
603 ; in 1900-1910, 603-4 ; of
miners (1912), 513 ; of police,
509 ; of railwaymen, (1912) 508-
530, (1919) 535-46
Stroud, woollen-workers of, 50
Sturgeon, Charles, 277
Summons to the first T.U. Congress,
738-40
Supply and Demand, 201
Surface workers, 513
Sutherland, Sir WiUiam, 541
Sweating, 371, 380-81
Swinton, Archibald, 170
Swinton, potters of, 133
Swiss Railway Management, 760
Symes, Inspector, 509
Symons, J. G., 170
Syndicalism, 654-9, 690
Taff Vale Strike and Case, 526, 600-
608
782
Index
Tailoresses, 136
Tailors, 44, 77, 97, 192, 259, 3x9.
360, 369, 371, 478. 551. 535, 744 ;
early combination of, in London,
3 ; I'irst Grand Lodge of Opera-
tive, 149 ; of Cambridge, 68 ;
of London, 67-8 ; of Nottingham,
75 ; of Sheffield, 80 ; statistics of,
436-7; strike of, in London, 1833,
149 ; strike of, in 1867, 278
Tankard- bearers, 42
Tanners, B'ermondscy, prosecution
of, 143
Tape Sizers, 477
Tarleton, General, 71
Taunton, 35
Taylor, Henry, 331
Taylor, Sir Herbert, 138, 141
Taylor, W. €., 48
Taylor, William, 23
Teachers, 505-6
Teachers, National Union of, 691
Tea-workers' and General Labourers'
Union, 403-4
Technical Engineers, Society of,
506
Telegraph clerks, 440
Terracotta, 354
Tester, John. 127
Textile Factory Workers, United
Association of, 435, 478, 623
Textile operatives. See Cotton-
spinners, Cotton-weavers, Woollen-
workers, etc.
Textile Trades, statistics of, 428-9,
434-6, 475-80, 744-9
Thomas, J. H., 524, 526, 543-4, 680
Thompson, James, 36
Thompson, J. B., 181
Thompson, Colonel Perronet, 148
Thompson, William, 116, 162
Thorne, Will, 402, 497, 684
Thorneycroft, G. B., 734
Thornton, W. T., 272
Ticket-collectors, 504
Tildsley, John, 175
Tiliett, B., 402-3, 406, 414, 501
Times, prosecution by the, 78-9
Tin plate Workers, 92, 431, 492 ;
Cf) operative Production and, 336:
of Wolverhampton, 243 ; strike
of. 194-5
Tiverton, 33-5, 93 ; woollen-
workers of, 34, 35
Tolpuddle, 145
Tomlinson, 139
" Tommy Shops," 89
Trade Boards, 647 ; Acts, 475, /J94-
495, 686
Trade Disputes Act, 606-8, 686
Trade Disputes Commission, 605-6
Trade Union Act of 1913, 631-4, 687
Trade Union conditions, 637-43
Trade Union, definition of, i ; and
the wage-system, i ; legal defini-
tion of, 617 ; life, 444-71 ;
origin of term, 113
Trades A dvocale and Herald of Pro-
gress, The, 211
Trades Councils, 242-9, 354-5, 453-7,
557-61, 685; exclusion from Con-
gress, 557 ; federations of, 557 ;
in Labour Party, 557 ; meetings
in Municipal Buildings, 558
Trades Journal, The, 171, 208
Trades' Newspaper and Mechanics'
Weekly Journal, The, 1 1 1
Trades Union Congress, 350, 358-
375. 700, 738-40
Trafalgar Square, 386-8
Tramping, 451-2
Transport and General Workers'
Union, 472-3, 499, 656
Transport workers, 438-40 ; in
Ireland, 472-3
Trant, William, 3
Treasury Agreement, 637-8, 642
" Triple Alliance," the, 516, 517
TroUope & Sons, 229, 328
Trow, Edward, 735
Truck, 50, 89, 371
Trusts, 675
Tucker, 268
Tuckwell, Rfiss Gertrude, 494
Tufnell, E. Carlton, 141
Turner, Ben, 480
Turner, William H., 5
Tyneside and National Labour
Union, 439 1
Typographical Association, 181,
4-3, 437. 482. See also Com-
positors
Typcjgraphical Society, 692. See
also Comi>'i--i''ir';
Index
783
Unemployed agitation, 385, 387-8
Unemployment benefit, 644, 646
Unemployment, failure to prevent,
644 ; prevention of, 696
Union Pilot and Co-operative In-
telligencer, The, 124
Union of Post Office Workers, 508,
551. See also Post Office Em-
ployees
United Garment Workers' Trade
Union, 551. See also Tailors
United Kingdom Alliance of
Organised Trades, 258-9
United Signalmen and Points-
men, 524, 531
United Textile Factor^' Operatives'
Association, 478
United Textile Factory Workers'
Association, 435, 478, 623
United Trades Association, 207
United Trades' Co-operative Journal,
The, 121
United. See Boilermakers, Brass-
workers, Brickla\'ers, Coach-
makers, Curriers, Machine-
workers, Patternmakers, Pilots,
Plumbers, Stonemasons, etc.
Unskilled Labourers. See General
Workers
Unwin, George, vi, 5, 12, 18, 29, 30,
34
Upholsterers, 432-433 ; Sewers'
Society (first women's union), 336
Vehicular worl£ers, 442
Verinder, F., 329
ViUiers, Rt. Hon. C. P., 186
Vincent, Charles Bassett, 5^3
Vincent, J. E. Matthew, 329
Vogel, P., 684
Voice of the People, The, 117, 122-4
Wade, Rev. A. S., 147
Wage, a legal minimum in Glouces-
tershire, 50
Wage-System, relation of Trade
Unions to the, i
Wages in London in 1669, 21
Waiters' Union, 684
Wakefield, cloth trade of, 35
Wakefield, E. G., 35, 61
Wakley, Thomas, 148, 171, 173, 186
Wallace, 106
Wallas, Professor Graham, vi, 32,
62, 89, 97, 175
Walton, A. A., 289
Wapping Society of Watermen, 11
War Cabinet Committee on Women
in Industry-, 642
War Emergency Workers' National
Committee, 691
War Office and strike-breaking, 247,
332-3
War, Trade Unions during the, 636-
649
Warde, IMark, 128
Wardle, G. T., 689, 695
Warehousemen, 442, 503-4
Warpdressers, 477
Waterguard Federation, 507
Watermen, London, 11, 14, 21
Watermen's Protective Society, 11
Watson, Aaron, 181, 296, 511, 625
Watson, R. Spence, 339
Watts, Dr. John, 211
Weavers, an Act touching, 48, 50 ;
Paisley, 23 See also Cotton-
weavers
Webb. J. J., 37
Weeks, Joseph D., 338
Weiier, Adam, 3S9-90
Welhngton, Duke of, 145
Wemyss, Earl of, 253
West Bromwich Miners, 434
Whewell, 617
Whitbread, W., 68, 69
WTiite, George, 40, 57, 61, 76, 77,
81, 89, 94, 100, 105, 251
Whitley Councils, 490, 646-8, 71S
Widnes election, 699
Wilkinson, Rev. J. Frome, 128
Wilhams, John, 146
Williams, J., 387, 400
W"ilhams, J. E., 526
Wilhams, R., 497, 500
WilMamson, S., 393
Wilson, J., 511
Wilson, J. Havelock, 406, 665-6,
669-70, 682
Wilson, John, 680
Wiltshire, shearmen of, 144 ;
weavers of, 49 ; woollen-wea\'ers
of, 65 ; woollen workers of, 49
Winters, Thomas, 195
784
Index
Wisbech, shoemakers (»f, 3
Witanagemot, 20
Wolverhampton, 248, 250 ; Build-
ing Trades Joint Committee,
308 ; tinplate workers of, 243 ;
(strike), 194-5 ; Trades Council,
399
Women Clerks and Secretaries,
Association of, 505
Women in Engineering, 638, 642-3
Women in Trade Unionism, 335-6,
424, 426-7, 474, 494-7
Women's Co-operative Guild, 497
Women's Labour I-eague, 497
Women's I'rotective and Provident
League, 336
Women's Wages, 424, G42
Wood, G. H., 86, 308
Woods, Samuel, 362, 684
Woodsawyers, 18
Woolcombers, 36-7, 44-5, 90, 127,
436, 480
Woollen Cloth Weavers, Act of
1756, 50-51
Woollen Cloth Weavers, Fraternity
of, 66
Woollen Workers, 40-41, 435-6; of
Yorkshire, 123, 125 ; statistics
of, 480
Woolstaplers, 37, 45, 83, yo, 178,
203 ; London Society of, 203 ;
Old Amicable Society of, 37
Woolwich, 697
Worcester, Gild Ordinances of, 8 ;
Trades Council, 558
Workers' Union, 498-v, 744
Working Men's Association, 255,
298, 680
Working Rules, 228
Workmen's Compensation Act,
364-6
Works Committee, 490, 647, 707,
716
Worsted manufacture, 36-7
Wright, Justice R. S., 68, 279, 362
Yearly bond, 44, 89, 169
Yeomen, 4, 5. 6
Yorkshire, clothiers of, 35-6, 67 ;
miners, 182, 301, 304-5, 349, 370.
433. 510-11, 522. 744
Young, Ralph, 340, 342
Young, Robert, 490
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